Gear Gaps

My best item is the crafted epic Spiked Titansteel Helm, boasting item level 200, along with my two-hander from the Argent Tournament.

Icecrown Citadel heroic mode is dropping item level 277 (and higher?).

Holy Cow!

I saw a post somewhere in which the commenter stated that item level 234 was "not a big deal".

I also saw a blue post or two stating that they did not intend for gear to become so advanced in this expansion.

Um. Excuse me. How do you let your game jump from item level 200 to 281 and not notice the potential problem before just throwing almost a hundred levels of gear into the game? At what point do you say, "Hey, maybe we don't need the gear to be quite that powerful"?

Maybe the bosses got out of hand and they decided it would take too much time to down rank the bosses so they just added ranks the gear instead.

But still. Can't they just decide on a good range between instances? Say, maybe ten levels per instance. That would allow for other increments in between to support crafting, badges, and modes.

Let's pretend that between the coliseum and ICC, there are only ten levels of gear. Here is what those ten levels are supporting:
5-man normal
5-man heroic
10-man normal
10-man heroic
25-man normal
25-man heroic
Crafting
Normal badges
Heroic badges

That is nine levels of gear, if everything was updated at once.

Now, I also am aware that Blizzard seems to think that players need bigger increases in order to get them to bother with the game at all.

Maybe they are correct, but I think they are underestimating the power of a good, emersive game. Or maybe this is the cheap way out and they save money by not focusing on the other things that might keep players coming back.

It seems to be a rather sordid affair, really.

Oh well.