Pet Peeve of the Day: Gear Scaling

Something I've been thinking about a great deal lately is how Blizzard decided to have gear scale with raid difficulty and size, and I believe they've designed the system entirely incorrectly.  Currently, 10-man Heroic instances have little to no incentive behind them other than progression, as 25-man Normal drops the same itemlevel gear and can be PuGed, and is a virtually guaranteed clear.  10H has an advantage of having slightly better itemized 245 gear, a higher loot to raider ratio, and only requires keeping 10 people focused rather than 25 (but actually requires said focus, unlike 25N), but otherwise has no true advantages over simply PuGing 25N each week.

Nothing burns quite as much as knowing I'm on one of the best progression teams on the server, yet looking around and seeing people within a couple hundred gear-score of me (or even almost equal to me) that are in some little-known guild that never raids, yet that player PuGs 25N each week and therefore has nearly the same or higher average itemlevel as me.  Thus I propose the system which Blizzard should have used for the ilevel progression:

10 Normal
The easiest of the easy, 10N will have the lowest itemlevel items: 232 for ToC and 251 for IC.

25 Normal
Given it's PuGable nature and lack of true difficulty (other than keeping 25 people focused and doing what they need to), 25N will have an IL half a teir above 10N: 239 for ToC and 258 for IC.

10 Heroic
Befitting it's significant jump in difficulty over 25N, yet it's smaller group size, 10H will have an IL a full tier above 25N: 251 for ToC and 271 for IC.

25 Heroic
As difficult as it gets, 25H will have the highest IL available, half a tier above 10N: 258 for ToC and 277 for IC.

The blatant advantage of this design is that it immediately separates heroic (ie. 'hardcore') raiders from casual ones, while still allowing casual raiders to experience the content and get gear that, while not bleeding-edge good, it still quite solid.  It does, however, also allow the hardcore raiders to retain the gear advantage that was the trademark of hardcore raiding for the first 4 years of the game.

Another distinct advantage of this system is that it puts 10-man Heroic forward as a viable gear progression option, as it has a noticeable gear advantage over 25N, and is only half a tier below 25H.  This would serve to inspire 25H guilds to run 10H as their auxiliary raid rather than 25N, cutting down on some of their boredom (and likely complaints of the game's lack of difficulty).

The last advantage evolved from this new system is that gear progression would be a relatively smoother curve, with 4 distinct IL gear sets rather than 3, yet it would still only take up 2 tiers worth of IL.  Assuming the 10N IL was placed equal to the 10H IL of the prior raiding tier, gear would show precisely a 1.5 tier upgrade per raiding tier, the exact jump currently displayed between ToC and IC.  In addition, it would show a full 1.5 tier upgrade between difficulties (befitting the significant increase in the difficulty of the encounters), and only a half-tier between raiding sizes (since handing 2.5 times as many people, while definitely something worth rewarding, isn't nearly as impressive as the Heroic modes).

As a raid leader that regularly runs 10H and partially PuGs what I can't guild-fill in my 25N each week, I can honestly say that the implication that 10H requires the same effort as PuGing a 25N is a fairly potent insult to 10H teams.   Given the fact that Blizzard seems a lot more interested in making sure both raid sizes are valid options for raiding then they do making sure PuG raids are as rewarding as possible, this change would alleviate much of the frustration and complaining by the more hardcore raiders (who strongly dislike seeing the visible marks of their progress become next to meaningless to the casual observer), yet still allow the more casual raiders access to the upper-end content.