That's definitely encouraging for others, who might be in a similar position.
Starting... mid-season.

The honor changes are definitely excellent news.
You can at least get full Honor gear, with half the effort (granted still a fair bit of time... but less of a grind).
And a set of Honor gear, is close to 2.2k resilience.
Which will put you a lot closer to competitive.

My first foray into 5's did not go that well.
A good composition of 4x Frost DK's + 1x Holy Pally.
The team had poor weaponry, and not even full honor gear yet.
And definitely lacked a lot of tweaks, macros, combinations, etc.
Played 18 games, and did not kill even one opponent... so much for the Death Bunnies...
The excellent community here gave suggestions to improve... http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=36048

Since then, I've run 2's... playing one toon, and getting a partner from Trade chat.
Each toon plays, until at least five wins that week.
Which has ranged from five to fourteen games per toon.
Yesterday was six weeks of points (they have full Honor gear in the other slots).

Cuddlés actually ran extra games beyond her five...
Played with a Shadow Priest, going 5 Wins & 5 Losses at the start of the week.
Then yesterday, after finishing points on Snugglés (who was the last of my five to get their wins)...
Cuddlés played with a brand new Frost DK...
He copied my talent spec and glyphs, asked what rotation to use, etc.
He died every game, but we went 5 Wins & 3 Losses.
So I got to return the favor, and carry some random undergeared players this week... similar to how random players pretty much carried my DK's (some of them bribed... with Gold per Win) the first three weeks until they got their Conquest 2-Handers.

Juds (Holy Pally) also played with an undergeared Subtlety Rogue.
Fresh to 85th, on the day we played our games.
He had four pieces of level 80 Arena gear, quest 85 greens/blues in the other slots, and was using a Heroic Lich King level 80 dagger.
On the plus side, he had previously earnt Gladiator in two different seasons... so knew what he was doing.
It took us 12 Games to get 5 Wins.

Perseverance pays off.
It does get better/easier.
I've found Monday (last chance for points each week) and Tuesday (first chance for points each week) to offer the easiest opposition; the other weekdays offer the most challenging opposition, while the weekend is somewhere in between the two difficulty levels.