Which i appreciate this perspective it is ultimately a catastrophe for the developers. The game offers very little else for casual players beyond the skinner box and it seems that the game is basically just engineered around that. If people start unhokimg from that skinner box...
In Cata WoW had a jump the shark moment. When they removed tier from the vendor. At that point the man behind the curtain was kinda obvious and it became less about playing my characther and more about trying to figure out which set of hoops they wantes us to jump through.