I can only speak on a hyper casual view of mages, since I barely play alts enough to understand them. What I do know is that I don’t want to deal with Rune of Power on top of mechanics when (at least from what I can see), most other classes don’t have to talent into a mobility inhibitor for sometimes-damage when others, mainly the melee, look a lot more “free” when they play.
Except for paladins, I suppose, since I remember hearing a ton of negative feedback about requiring Consecration for stuff. I figure that’s in the same spirit of frustration.
I’m sure it’s just because I suck but sometimes it does feel like mage is umbrella’d by some of its own talent options. I don’t like arcane having more cooldowns than rotational buttons that all serve the purpose of being used together, and button mashing due to extreme haste values. So even though I still enjoy the base rotations of the three specs, there’s actually no viable build that’s actually fun for me. So it’s easier not to do group content at all than stress myself out, even though I keep trying to work up the enthusiasm to do raids or dungeons each time a patch comes out.