I know a lot of water has passed under this bridge, so it is a little late to be talking about it much now, but I am curious at other people's take on the subject.
Right now, you need to meet some minimum level of rep with different factions as well as having the required amount of VP's to purchase the gear. Getting rep is a bit easier now in 5.2, but in 5.0, it was pretty much just dailies, dailies, and more dailies, if you wanted to unlock even the chance to spend your VP on gear, which didn't sit very well with a lot of people.
My question is, instead of the current MoP system, would people have preferred where they could purchase rep gear with 0 rep but with an inflated VP cost if they didn't grind the rep to a point, say +10% VP cost per rep level below what the current minimum rep would have been?
For example, let's take
Dawnblade's Chestguard
In 5.0, it required revered with Golden Lotus and sold for 2250VP. So, with a scaling rep-based cost, the cost would be as follows:
2925 VP = Neutral (+30%)
2700 VP = Friendly (+20%)
2475 VP = Honored (+10%)
2250 VP = Revered (+0%)
2025 VP = Exalted (-10%)
That would allow you to buy anything after farming enough VP yet not
require you to farm ANY rep, although the benefit for doing so is still very clear to the player. It just simply wouldn't be mandatory, which was the chief complaint by most all. They can then make their own cost vs effort analysis on a case by case basis to determine if they were fine with paying the increased price or if they would farm some rep first to knock off 10% per rep level.
So, simply question, would you have preferred that?