Um raiding was quite popular in Vanilla, sure not everyone got to see Naxx, but most of at least did MC and some BWL and everyone raided AQ20 and ZG.
As far as GC comments go, you realize this was just PR speak right? I swear people can be so obtuse when it comes to these developer’s comments. How many times did Ion make comments in their Q and As that you just rolled you eyes to? These guys have to make excuses for the direction they are being forced into taking from the higher ups.
Raiding participation was never an issue for the bulk of the WoW player base. LFR was introduced with one goal in mind, to target players that didn’t play MMOs. Even GC said it was his single greatest regret he had with WoW. Also, if he was happy with Blizzard and having fun working on WoW and not being forced to put in crappy systems like LFR, I think he would have stayed.
He even said that working on WoW became a chore because he was constantly being forced to dumb the game down in order to attract different types of casual players.
I stand by what I said! LFR was a short sighted mistake heaped on the developers by people who never understood what makes MMOs fun.
All they say is that 50-75% of the resources were going into this content so they wanted 100% participation with the added incentives of maybe attracting more anti-social, casual gamers that probably wouldn’t ever think about playing an MMO, which is probably the bulk of modern gamer’s.