Why Tobold stays on my list

Tobold on WoW's Celestial Steed Sale:
"We started out with a game in which people played and were rewarded with virtual goods for playing. That over time evolved into a situation where we valued the virtual rewards more than the gameplay leading to it. People began to minmax, to "optimize the fun out of playing", trying to get to the reward in the fastest possible way, regardless of whether that way was fun to play or not. And the developers saw that, and said: "Well, if you want only the virtual reward and not the gameplay, we are quite willing to sell you that directly!". In short, the players are as much to blame for this than the developers or "greedy" managers."

I see this quite often as a tank in heroics. People want to get through the instance as fast as possible for their two Emblems of Frost. The immediate retort is "I've ran this instance hundreds of times, it is boring and I want it over with as quickly as possible".

What a sucky part of gameplay! Doing something you don't want to do, but you do it anyway for a "sparkly".

I can't remove myself from this as I was part of it myself in the form of raiding. I raided Molten Core long after it was fun to do so. I "needed" gear, my guild "needed" gear and my guild's alts "needed" gear. I've raided several places since then, but give MC a special mention because at its core, pun not intended, it was a big boring lava cave. Killing Ragnaros for the first time, ranks as one of my, if not number one, best memories of WoW. Killing it again and again and again and again? One of my worst.

Basically I told Blizzard, I'm okay with crappy gameplay as long as Tier 2 legs are a reward. I shouldn't have put up with it, but I did. I feel like I've learned from the experience. But is it too late?