In retail wrath they have added a lot of catch up mechanics trough gamma dungeons and Ulduar heroic gear that can be purchased with the currency dropped trough these dungeons.Also lower pvp tier gear being available for really cheap honor in area 52 in Netherstorm like deadly/furious pieces costing about 5-10khonor a piece.
They have also added personal rating in arena which allows for the possibility of playing with many partners.
The lower tier raids like Naxx and Ulduar are pretty easy to do with low gear and can be used to gear up fresh characters on retail.Here on Icecrown the only time someone hosts a Ulduar is for mount/achievs and requires 6k gs+ grp because doing it with low gear people is near impossible.Not only are the lower tier raids boosted but they also require a decent amount of coordination and tactics to clear which makes gearing an fresh character only possible trough fos/pos/hor before ICC.Why not reduce difficulty of older raids instead of increasing it?
The hardcore players on lordaeron can keep their hard raids but why not have these quality of life changes be implemented on the casual Icecrown realm?
Lastly the 3.4.0 client brings a lot of new and fresh addons and cool UI by players on retail which we currently don't work on 3.3.5 client.
To me it seems like all of these things are simply quality of life changes that would make our beloved warmane an even better experience and it also might attract a lot of retail players back on warmane after their servers go on with cataclysm.
Catch up gear through old raids is pointless. Once you've done few RDF HC's, you should have enough gear to do ToC 5, FoS &PoS spam for 200-219 gear. Eventually shifting to 219-232 with their heroic versions. These dungeons (FoS, PoS & HoR) provides players with well rounded gear "sets" that pretty effectively covers every item slot. This gear doesn't require a) 10 people b) raid level coordination and engagement c) that much time. While doing these dungeons, you get accumulate EoT for more ilvl 232 - 245, or lower, gear.
We also have coin and point stores where available. Not to mention craftable 200-264 ilvl gear.