Your numbers are a bit off on the gap in old raid tiers, but your "lower the insane power scaling" thing is something that has been being told to the devs since the original beta. No shit.
And i agree wholeheartedly. We also dont need 4 raid difficulties. 2 would be fine, honestly, and turn LFR into a Mythic-5 experience. Same story, tune the encounters differently. Use all the same art assets. Lets people experience the story if they want, keep the weekly lockout, and count it as a mythic dungeon.
For clairy, back from Vanilla > Cata (at least early Cata, i know they added LFR in there later and that messed things up) it was 12/13 iLevels between tiers (they alternated, so 25/two tiers), and six between Normal/Hard.
For instance, from LK:
Naxx 10 was 200
Naxx 25 was 212
KT and the dragon right before him (KT i know, unsure about the dragon and too lazy to look it up) dropped +6, being considered "hard".
Ulduar 10 was 212
Ulduar 25 was 225
Hard Modes dropped +6
etc. The entire xpac only went through 64 iLevels (200 base at level 80, from Heroics or Naxx 10 or Crafted, through 264 for Heroic LK).
We do that in ONE FUCKING TIER now.
That's the problem.
Game designers who dont understand Mudflation in a statistics-based game are morons.
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Sunwell Island had catch up gear through the Heroic version of the 5-man.
Worked fine.
Edit: and they added new badge gear for for each Tier (usually only 2-4 pieces) in Shat. And crafted gear was viable (for the 2-4 slots it was available for) for the entire xpac.