That was the case in Vanilla as well. And they did not like the end result. Where by the end of Vanilla practialy nobody was geared enough to do Naxramas. So they spent ages making Naxramas only for 1000 people (of multiple millions, cause they used to publish that data).
They tried many things. Karazan one of them. That is what I understand from the discussions back in the day. I remember something along those lines when the hardliners said “40 man or nothing”…
Then they finally concluded their experiments with the Sunwell. That is what I remember atleast. Might be wrong.
So I thought about this a bit more and went down memory lane and this is what I remember. Il correct my previous posts about this:
So what I remember is that after the debocle of Naxramas in TBC they created a 10 man intoductory raid, that was relatively easy to access. And then, the gear that droped on each of the progresson raids had overlap.
The whole idea of this system is that if someone started in the middle of TBC he did not have to clear each raid multiple times, get each tier multiple times untill they could access the current raid (like they had to in Vanilla). They just needed to farm “a bit” cause there was significant overlap in gear.
And that was apparently insufficient. Because when Black Temple arrived, not enough people went through the whole “progression” to actually participate. So they went “nuclear” and put the daily quests in Quelthalas, out of fear that it would become a Nax 2.0.