In Everquest, when that was the biggest game around, Sony was happy to implement raid encounters where only the top 1-3% of the total player base, usually 1-4 guilds per server... were able to complete the content.
A lot of those players were happy to have exclusive access to certain zones, which required boss kills to for attunement.

I was at a friends place one day, and their guild chat was pretty amazing.
One of the players said something to the effect of, "Holy shit, one of the peasants sent me a tell, what should I do?".
Afterlife (Mithaniel Marr (EQ) now Cenarius (US-Wow)) considered all non-AL as peasants on the server.

If you want a challenging raid environment, without a plethora of addons to make encounters easy/trivial, warcraft is not the game for you.
If you want a game where 99% of the player base will eventually experience 99% of the content of a given expansion, then warcraft is the game for you.

It all depends on your motivations.

As an aside, look how successful the hard-core raiding environment (Everquest) is, in relation to the casual-friendly playing environment (Warcraft).