The scaling system made gear feel less rewarding? What? Your had gear progression that made you feel stronger the more pieces of gear that you had. So much so that you could even stand up to Mythic Raiders out in the open world. Also the RBG problem was the amount of Fly hacking, kick botting, wall hacking and whatever other botting techs that were running rampant and there wasn’t much Blizzard was doing to circumvent it. So much so, that players made a website to log each and every cheater that was participating in Arenas and RBGs at the time.
And yeah, WoD Arena participation was pretty rampant. And part of the upgrade was essentially the catchup mechanic that they implemented. You behind a few weeks? Here’s an increase to your Conquest cap for each week you missed out on.