For the gear you can simply just pay a guild to do a full raid run. You get more gear for your money thqat way and don't have to stay around an NPC hoping to win for a retarded amount. Guilds sell runs all the time on the realm I'm on. Mounts and Pets are another one. You can buy the raid meta and drop mounts with gold already, so same thing applie here as it does gear. Rare drop mounts from older content, farm it. I have and I have a lot of them. I will never spend a dime on the BMAH. Let the people with gold or who are willing to buy go do so.
Stupid gold sink if you ask me. Just going to make the bad money makers buy gold to stay in competition with the people who can make the gold legit.