Try thinking as the manufacturers/distributors/developers.
Assume they don't pay, but you do (as you do pay in increased device/software/app costs, anyhows)
You can watch the VP8 video, or you can pay 2 cents per video and watch the almost-indistinguishable quality (although you've heard on /. that it's better) version.
Sure, it's only 2c, but which do you choose?
Assuming you aren't the equivalent of a 'rich bastard' (you can guess which companies the 'rich bastard' represents), which do you choose?

Yeah, cause Walmart failed so badly and hasn't been much competion in the supermarket industry....
Being like Walmart is surely a sign of failure.

(If your post was genuine masked as sarcasm, not just plain sarcasm, then let my post be a sarcastic agreement rather than counter-sarcasm. Or whatever.)

The actual full GearScore mod also polls a players statistics and will tell you how many (up to 5) kills they have on every other raid boss.
So it'll tell you if that specific character has, say, cleared Ulduar, ToGC, ICC, RS 5 times or more in 25man raid setting, and RS 4 tmes, or whatever they've done.
While they could be playing their partner/friends account, it doesn't say, sure.
That they're some top raid leader's love interest who gets consistantly carried is also true, but neither of these is likely, so it's a good indicator, better than them just having a high GS.
Of course, there can still be someone with 1k less GS and no raiding statists showing for that character who has done them on an alt and knows the fights, and can do it in a superior fashion to the first guy, this, also, is unlikely.
GS is good when you don't know anything else about a person. It's profiling, pure and simple. With nothing else to go on, you take the guy for the role with the higher GS, and you're that much more likely to suceed.
But yeah, It'd rock if there was some new mechanic, like, say, 'MVP' ratings.
Every time a raid finishes, everyone in the raid choses the MVP. That affects those players MVP scores in some algorithmic weighting of how many raiders voted for them (it'd have to be at least, say, 1/5th of the raid to carry any weight) and adds to their overall.
Then, you use that in place of GS, I'm all for it. :)

I just deleted my page long reply. Instead I'll just post myself (and whoever else) a reminder/warning:
Don't feed the trolls

They're not built in yet due to time management priorities (feature creep prevention).
I thought GhostCrawler made that pretty clear?

Hehe, I used a mate at work's steam account to install Borderlands on 2 computers at my house, and coop played over LAN. All while my mate played his original copy online.
I later bought my own copies, however Steam allowed me (through breaking the rules, sure) to try the full game in coop (LAN only) mode just fine.
If I wanted I could have never bought the game and still be playing it on LAN without ever have paying for it.
Any new game I want to buy I can download to both machines, go to offline mode, and test out coop before buying another copy, and I can use my mates Steam account to try out any game's he's bought before buying them myself.
Not saying you should do this, or that it's legal, but it's both as legal and possible as the afformentioned 1 copy LAN parties were. Not reccomending you do it, but

The lockout is there purely to stop the elites from getting the top gear, then farming the raids out and charging others for a run through (and the loot) meaning that a) you have to earn your own loot, and b) the top end hardcore raiders don't get to gear up quite so fast.
Basically it narrows the gap, which makes the game more fun for all.
Same as how only one random a day gives you 2 frosties, etc.
In the end it discourages the culture of douchebags.
As much as I'd like to be able to create my own stuff in WoW, I don't want to look at every other person's created stuff, or waste bandwidth on downloading their meshes and textures when I could be using it for blizzard's professionally created ones.
Sure second life has a lot of good digital artists, but it has a lot more bad ones, and one of the things that makes blizzard's games so damn good is how polished they are. Letting anyone create stuff would totally destroy that.

Someone mod this guy up 'funny'
I'm sure the 'giving blizzard money for their cards, a much bigger moneysink, instead of their software' was intentional.

Simply coming up with an implementable plan doesn't justify that. In the business world you don't come out to the public with just an idea, but with a complete solution. The fact they opened it up for discussion on the forums before they implemented it is as good as can be expected, and better than either not opening it up for discussion, or simply coming out with the concept (if they had have done that the drama would still be going on).
Besides, the implementation, while flawed, still had a lot of good points to be credited to it.

Please never let second life corrupt WoW.
And they're redoing how raid lockouts work for Cata, and applying those changes to ICC and RS with the 4.01 patch, these changes will make it easier for raid groups, allowing a player to go with a different raid group for every boss over a single week, potentially. It will make picking up pugs to fill raids, or breaking a 25 man raid whort a few people into 2 10 mans for an evening then back to 25 later, and so on. So, yeah, they are playing attention, and improving things, accross the board.

If all the EU posters are like you I can see why GC doesn't post much on those forums.
4.01 will be out before too long, rest assured that if Prot Pallies are broken, they'll be fixed, but I suspect you'll realise you're just wrong :)

Yeah, it's almost like game designers have skipped the research and added in levelling just to screw with the players.
You need to find some old school game (pre D&D, at least, not sure how much further back you'd have to go) and find yourself a game without all this boring levelling crap.

That's a harsh take.
Blizzard innovated ways to get more out of the engine for the same experience.
Not allowing free flying gained a number of benefits:

• The paths people took from point A to point B were more realistic to the average person
• The flow of movement could be factored into quests and items of interest
• It lent a mor enatural feel of immersion to the game, where you followed roads, paths, etc
• Characters weren't so all-powerful they could fly anywhere
• They could creativly remove a lot of the terrain that a player would never see from the places they could get to - backs of buildings, tops of trees, etc, etc, which allowed them to put more detail into what players could see without requiring top end expensive machines

I could probably go on.
When Burning Crusades came out they figured that a) players were 'more powerful' at level 70, so flying wasn't so unrealistic, b) computers were more powerful, so they could do full terrain, c) They'd explored most of what could be done with the ground limits, and could now focus on other gameplay aspects with flight, etc, and so they bought in flying.
Apparently it worked out, and computers are getting even more powerful on average, so they're bringing in flying (still only at high levels) to cataclysm. It just keeps on expanding the experience, without losing the good parts of the experience (no flight and it's mechanics and effect on levelling 1-60)
They continue to build and expand on what they've done, keeping the good, and fixing the bad.
I played CoH, flying was cool, but that was all it really had, the terrain was 90% boxes and so boring, the textures and graphics lackluster, the quests, storyline, boring. The mechanics of playing were poor. And they've done how much to improve on this? Their big new thing was to add villians, which was almost zero affect on any of the problems it had.
But yeah, WoW almost certainly looked at all the other games out there (and not just other MMOs) and took the best of them to build with. And thank god they did, it's resulted in the best MMO out there (as an entire experience). They'd be stupid not to start with the best of what exists.
I hope some other company does the same, and comes in and takes the best of WoW and other games, and builds an even better MMO, I'll go play it instead.
Meanwhile, however, Blizzard has been continuing to take the best, improve on it, and relase it as expansions, and that's why I still play WoW.

With cross realm battlegrounds, there'll be at least hundreds of people going in, especially with new skills and new gear to test out.
Also, battlegrounds give EXP now, but even with that aside, I'm sure our top arena killers will be L85 within 2 days of cata coming out, if not sooner.