As a guild leader of a serious parsing guild in sod, and as someone who also plays retail wow nearly every day, I would just like to say that I totally agree. The sense of community and the fun of experiencing and discovering new content at a leisurely pace, is what makes sod so great in my mind. This aspect however, when multiple raid difficulties are added to the game, simply becomes overshadowed by the pressure to not feel like an idiot by doing the “lesser” versions of raids. Players will always pick the option that more efficiently furthers their goals of improving their characters, even if it is the significantly more frustrating, time consuming, or otherwise annoying option. It’s why people choose to do the most monotonous and dull leveling experiences imaginable like spamming the same incursion event for dozens of hours; because it’s simply just the most efficient, easier and objectively better way to go about levelling.
Adding multiple raid difficulties will lead to a significant chunk of the player base, to the detriment of their own fun, to force themselves to engage with it. Not out of fun or because they necessarily like harder content (not only do we have parsing and speed running but we already have other games we play for this purpose); but because it’s simply just the better way to go about progressing your character. I urge the team to consider removing the extra difficulty levels, or at the very least to consider not tying player-power and progression to them. Doing so will significantly reduce the laid back, “Soda & Pretzels” nature of the game which so many people play it for.
Players already have irl jobs outside of the game. We should not expect players to have put in the time to frustratingly wipe for hours on end on newer and harder raid difficulties, and especially not so on the hours of time required to farm gold for the consumables which will ultimately be expected for these harder difficulties (all of this multiple times a week mind you because of how frequent raid lockouts now are), just so that players can achieve the same level of, and much simpler and less time consuming, character progression goals of the previous phases and the original game.
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How are you spending 200g per raid night in Sunken Temple? And then you try to use “average, casual jimmy” as an argument - no casual are spending that kind of gold in ST (not even most hardcore players do that).
Worst case, you will need a lot of gold for max heat. Casual Jimmy won’t be playing that. They don’t give better gear. This is literally just making the game more fun for all of us who got bored of how easy ST was post-nerf. You can opt out of it just fine if it isn’t for you.
If it gave better gear, that would be an issue. But it doesn’t. Yes, good guilds running max heat will gear up slightly faster, but let’s be realistic - they already gear up faster than average, casual players. People running max heat (assuming it’s actually hard) will be the kind of people that organise raid comp partially for loot distribution and doesn’t miss a lockout.
Hard mode is literally just giving something fun for a bunch of people without impacting anyone who chose to opt out of it. But of course someone makes a long post complaining about it.
players that don’t feel like forcing themselves to do the harder modes have no business doing those difficulties anyway, lets be honest.
this content is not for the casual baddie, the normal mode is for them.
the training wheels are off, this is level 60.
its time to git gud if you want the best stuff as fast as possible.
the game has catered to casual joe (and still does) for far too long, and casual joe has had 3 whole phases - half a year - to learn how the game works.
there is no more excuses.
this is how its going to be, and if you can’t cope, nobody other than you is forcing you to do it.
wdym there was a ton of gatekeeping in p1 , casters were so bad dps wise that if you weren’t a rogue/war/hunt you wouldn’t get a spot ever 
in phase 1?
casters were bad in phase 1?
i mean, maybe they weren’t warrior levels of broken OP, but bad ??
the only ones who got gatekept in phase 1 were people with no gold to pay for loot because every raid was a GDKP outside of guild raids.
we certainly had no gatekeeping of casters in my guild, but then again, just like we don’t sweat too hard about parses, we don’t sweat about meta builds either.
as long as the bosses go down and we don’t have to spend hours coping with baddie pugs who need to learn every fight from scratch, we are happy, hence why we haven’t raided in weeks by now… because its impossible to find players to raid with who are worth a spit atm… even the pugs we were coping on stopped logging on.