There's a common subgenre of Facebook and mobile games like "Farmville" that basically involve getting players to log in on a particular schedule to perform routine tasks -- clicking on crops or clicking on cows -- in order to achieve some sort of progress.
These games achieved a popularity peak a couple of years ago, and then Facebook throttled the ability of these games to broadcast updates to the newsfeeds of friends of players, which slowed the spread of the games. Many players also got bored of this kind of gameplay. Zynga isn't doing well.
Unfortunately, WoW has internalized the "Farmville" game design philosophy for a lot of its progress mechanics in MoP. The game seems to want to reward you for playing, and especially for playing a lot, rather than for playing well.
I was a big fan of the philosophy behind dungeons in Cataclysm: that they ought to be hard. The development team at the time was perfectly content with the idea that many random groups would fail to complete the content.
That position seemed to weakin in the 4.1 troll heroics, when many players were unable to complete the dungeons at all, and found their attempts uniformly ending with their groups vote-kicking them. Blizzard's response was to make vote-kick harder to use, and to make the next set of dungeons much easier; nearly impossible to fail, in fact.
I understand that a lot of people didn't like failing at dungeons, but the possibility (or likelihood) of failure made success a goal worth pursuing. Without the risk of losing, completing dungeons and scenarios no longer feels like winning. Without a meaningful performance requirement required to complete these tasks, victory no longer comes with validation.
LFR, Dungeons, scenarios and dailies feel, in short, like cow clicking.
A lot of stuff gets skewed when this mentality takes over, and the game begins to demand time rather than performance. We see AFKers in LFR and botters taking over random battlegrounds, because individual performance has been removed from the equation that determines rewards.
The quality of play in LFR raids is deplorable. People completely ignore mechanics and stand in ground effects. People are AFK during boss fights. If you inspect people you often see that their gear is ungemmed, unenchanted, unforged. There is no longer the sense that the content demands things of players. There is no longer the sense in random groups that other players will have expectations about your performance that they'll punish you for failing to meet.
The result is a less compelling game. Without the need to join an organized progression guild to see raid content, there's less incentive to do so. More people are raiding, but there seem to be fewer progression guilds, and many people who used to raid now just dabble in LFR, or have quit altogether.
What's especially frustrating is the fact that Blizzard continues to make challenging content, but walls it off from gear progression. We should be nudged toward things like Challenge Modes and Brawler's Guild for pre-raid gear and character progression, instead of LFR. The game should expect and demand things of us beyond time commitment. We should be better able to differentiate ourselves.
I admit, in the stratified societies of previous expansions, it was probably difficult to maintain the subscriptions of the players who occupied the bottom rungs; the people who were vote-kicked out of every dungeon, berated in every battleground, and excluded from every raid. I'm not against there being stuff for such people to do, and ways for the baseline player to feel a progression relative to their past level of acquisition and static parts of the game, if not a progression relative to other players. However, the current state of the game really pushes a lot of players into a similar LFR progression path, including many players who used to participate in organized raids.