I personally don’t care about slime cat, especially after seeing how teensy it is in-game, but I will say that no one was expecting it to just be handed out. People were willing to do all 3 raids on LFR to full completion. And it wasn’t even really the fact that it could only be gotten on normal and above that made everyone mad, it was that it was originally datamined to be available on every difficulty, and then it was changed to only be normal and above.
So you had a whole community full of casuals that were amped up to get a new mount, only to find out that if they want to get it, they need to pug or suddenly make 9 friends. It just felt like a slap in the face, considering how the mount that we all came together and voiced our opinions on WAS given out for free to literally everyone. Now they were suddenly gate keeping a mount that many people preferred over the tree we got.