One thing I always found amusing, is that players love to curse Ghostcrawler for "dumbing down" the game. They don't realize that Ghostcrawler is actually a very hardcore player. He loved atunements, harder raids, and removing prestige items, etc... The issue is, he and his team know they are not a majority in the game.
This came all the more noticeable when Ghostcrawler attempted to bring some of that difficulty he desired back into the game for Cataclysm, and it backfired. Many of his comments about professions just help cement this, and I can even sense a sort of bitterness from him when it comes to things like account-wide mounts. This is why a lot of the mounts like the Mechano-Hog and the Guild Mounts kept flip flopping back and forth between character only and account-wide. His last bastion to hold out some prestige on mounts is by attempting to make the Gladiator mounts remain character based, even when it's hypocritical in face of all the rare raid mounts being account-wide.
They give Ghostcrawler too much credit for the changes in the game, so they don't realize it was the players input and trends the ultimately lead to where we are now. That's not a bad thing.
I'm honestly more excited for this expansion than any since Burning Crusade.
This expansion I am more excited for then any of the previous. It fixes all the issues I had with Cataclysm, adds new things for me to do at end game, and just feels very adventurous. It's not perfect (the reputation change I find to be a mistake) but so far playing the beta I have had a blast, way more then any other beta I have taken part in for past expansions.
