Well, going back to wow vanilla, dire maul was basically the first dungeon in the game I ran into, where hard CC was basically mandatory. Of course, lots of things have changed since then, people use efficient specs etc.
However, there was a significant difficulty spike in DM versus any other 5 man instance. If you're geared out with basically all pre raid BIS stuff, you probably won't have too much trouble with DM, especially if you're running a ranged DPS group.
