Name an encounter which took more than a month to down (encounters that were unkillable in their initial state do not count.)

Indeed, people should start using 4H instead, if they want to go by "time from encounter progress started till death of said encounter".

Still doesn't fix that sometimes there is no safe one.

Look up the distinction between a priori and a posteriori, then you will be on the path to figuring out why this is terribly naive.

That's about as wrong as it gets. The guy you quoted had it right.

You don't understand the mindset at all. They're a means to an end, not the end itself.

The thing is WoW allowed UI mods from the start.

First highlight: that's where we differ then. Also, I meant specifically the world boss-y-ness of EQ. Blowable spawns and so on. You think that'd suit todays MMOs?

That's funny, BWL, AQ40 and Naxx were the high points of raiding for me. Maybe I just happened to raid with sensible people. Out of interest, would you advocate the way bosses worked in EQ for todays raid enviroment? You can't deny that's part of the excitement in EQ. If everyone could just go and kill any boss (because it'd be instanced), would you have enjoyed the sea of basically tank n spank fo 40 minutes encounters?

#1 burden of proof fallacy, here we go again. But yes, let's turn this one over for now. #2 the slippery slope fallacy here consists in you stating that IF addons are added, they WILL (necessarily) become needed for raiding. This is unsubstantiated. Look up the problem of induction if you're thinking about replying "but WoW has shown us [...]". #3 the argument I see people making, which in wording resembles yours, is that of assigning a motive to the people not wanting addons of wanting to have their "bad" stay hidden. This is different from what you are writing, in that this argument never assumes that bad people want to improve, but merely that they don't want to be criticized by other people. Of course someone who wants to stay bad can do so, but whether he can get away with it or not is another matter.

And if one was to try to be helpful: A group of players queueing together. Premades often have better communication than pugs, and thus feel harder to play against. It's "pre"-made because the group is already made before the warzone starts.

There are other plausible causes for raiding being more fun pre-addon, such as it being a new, novel experience. Once gathering a big group of people to kill stuff with lots of HP is no longer exciting in itself, then encounter design will need to carry the raiding game. Let's not even begin with how much rose-tinted glasses play into this.

#1 speculation, dismissed. #2 slippery slope fallacy, dismissed #3 Strawman, no one is making that argument. Try making some arguments that don't fall into obvious fallacies before requesting that people make informed arguments.

One might also infer that raiding would have been very boring if that was the case.

If [Game Developer] needs to add more information on the screen in order to be able to design interesting encounters, yet keep them within the skill of the majority of the playerbase, then I welcome it. Those messages didn't dumb down the game, it allowed blizzard to design more complex encounters without shutting out the majority of players. If blizzard kept doing tank n spank encounters after they added the messages, then it'd be dumbed down. Relative increase in information accompanied by a relative increase in amount of information needed is a good thing.