This is the biggest problem from what I saw. I played on an RP server, where there were only a handful of real raiding guilds (if that), so it wound up with large portions of our population just being cut off from what they had been doing in the past...so they went for the content they would do otherwise, which were dungeons or heroic dungeons.
*put on tinfoil hat*
I always had the impression that there was an underlying meaning to the difficulty of raids and that was to give the new developers time to slug through creating the next tier of raids. In retrospect, all the balance issues, hot fixing, and delays gives me the impression that the new team is having a hard time filling the shoes of those who worked through TBC and WotLK content and needed to provide a steep learning curve for players to stifle progression.
In between all of this, we are given two rehashed dungeons to start another absurd subplot with the Zandalari which will likely never be touched on again in the game and require a book to 'tie up' the events in the same way they did with The Shattering.
From there, they only designed half a raid as they put all the tier gear in to one zone with half the bosses of, say, Ulduar which also had full tier. This creates another artificial difficulty for the players where, in 10 man, only two pieces of gear will drop in a HUGE loot table and can potentially stifle progression once again.
So, now we're being told 4.3 will be the largest content update since Cataclysm and will be released this year but have yet to provide any details aside from datamining speculation. I suspect they will either release an update which is far from the quality the community is asking for and hot fixed over several months or they are pulling work away from 'Titan' to meet this deadline.
/tinfoil hat