I don't disagree that is what they are 'saying'. I'm merely saying that if they really wanted to separate them they would have them share a lockout and you could do A (story time) or B (progression time). Perhaps a better option is to just remove the loot, lockout, and further reduce the difficulty of story time so that people who want to expericent the story can do that. I remember them well and I think the rumblings of "I can't do naxx?" were very minimal. It was understood that Naxx was a tough place to be and 40 people geared and attuned people were hard to find. I think Blizz said 7% of people saw it the first time around which is why the content was recycled. I think that the casuals would then side with my above idea and i think that should satisfy both them and the 'hardcore' that are left in the game. Furthermore I think that following the 'story time' model, TFB (as well as EC) should be accessable on the same difficulty level as EV/KP in that it requires only Tionese to complete and drops Columi. I mean if we are going to say these people are just here for the 'story' then why are we gating their content based on gear anyway?

I dont think there is currently any content in this game geared toward 'hardcore raiders'.

Clearly their goal is to slow the gearing curve. NM KP (and NM EV for that matter even though it never had the comms) are simply too easy in their mind to complete and they would cause extra BH comms floating around. Honestly, under their new (current) vision, I think it is time that they just have the lockouts share between SM and HM/NM as people are clearly not being incentived to do SM.

This is yet another in a string of mind bogglingly dumb ideas. If you want to gate content by gear, that is fine. But the least you could do is go the full way in copying the WoW model and make the previous sets (through campaign) easier to get as the new set (dread guard) comes out.