When did raiding become about loot?

Title says it all. This is more of a venting post about raiding than anything but you all are players and most of you raid so maybe you can help me understand this.

The guild I am in is 7/12 heroic10 for icc. I know we aren't the greatest and I have plenty of experience raiding in the top end guilds on my server and would rather raid with my good friends who I've been raiding with since back in kara. It's not the same downing a progression boss with a bunch of people you only tolerate to see content when compared to raiding with good friends and finally accomplishing something.

The incident is tonight we were planning on running heroic10 again and to work on the few remaining bosses we have left in heroic. We all agreed that we would put a 3 wipe limit on any heroic boss that has previously been downed so we would not spend all night wiping on the first half and actually get something accomplished. Everybody agreed and we start clearing the trash.

Now laugh if you want, we wiped three times on the first boss and swapped it over to normal just to move on (we only had 2 healers). We down him with ease, distribute loot and move on. No problems arise and nobody says a word. We get to the 2nd boss (couldn't care bout the names atm, me venting :P) and it was the weekly raid so we proceed to do the weekly on normal mode just to make it easy and not spend all night doin the weekly. 1 person hinted that they wanted to do it on heroic and forget the daily but the other 9 people just wanted to keep moving deeper so we complete it on normal and move on.

Again, no problems arise. Nobody said shit and we go up to the ship for our free loots (that we did complete on heroic). Loot is handed out and the MT says she has to go and walks out on the raid (I was OT as she better gears me). So I whisper her to make sure everything was fine and dandy and that her grandma wasn't on fire running around the kitchen (or something). And that's when shit hit the fan.

She leaves the raid because we did not do the first 2 bosses on heroic and she only needed loot from those bosses (from the heroic version). Now while I was gone on my break I was replaced as one of the MT's for the guild and I'm fine with that. I gquit and left (ended up goin to the top alliance guild for when I would start raiding again but was just a social unless you count the 1 raid I attended). So when I came back I had a talk with the new tank who pretty much replaced me and we were on good terms and I had a lot of respect for this person and we had pretty much the same outlook on raiding (til this incident). Progression.

She claims there has been drama and that she won't tolerate it and would rather not play. Fair enough, I understand from being the recruiting officer for the 2nd top alliance guild and would rather not deal with drama myself. But why didn't she speak up before we start and downed the bosses on normal? She basically threw a tantrum and walked out and the raid fell apart; three bosses into the run. Tomorrow we are going to be working on LK on 25 normal and monday is never a good day for trying to resume raids in my experience.

With the background to this whole post in mind it brings me to the title of this post. When did raiding become about loot?

As a die hard raider I feel that loot is a reward for the time being spent and that overall progression > loot. Plain and simple. You should raid not for the loot but because you enjoy progression raiding (given your in a progression raiding guild, which we are, or try to be. Still in the top 10 guilds on the server ;p). I'm the kind of sick person that enjoyed wiping on KT back in bc for months where we spent 30+ hours a week trying to get him down (pre nerf). Yea I was sick of the fight but the reward of finally getting him down (we were 3rd or 4th on our server overall to down him) was greater than any possible loot that could have dropped (actually passed on everything out of sheer happiness the asshat was dead).

Ok, so I got slightly off subject but the point remains. When did progression raiding become about loot? What happened to the fights that you couldn't down because they were hard as hell and the joy of finally downing the boss was your only motivation?

I believe wotlk seriously ruined a lot of the raiding qualities in the people that call themselves raiders as a whole. People are so used to loot pinata bosses that raiding has become nothing more than loot *cough* voa *cough*.

Sure blizzard tried to fix the problem by adding in hardmodes and achievements for glory of the raider / etc to give some incentive. But why buy the cow when the milk is free?

Anyone else miss actual progression raiding with die hard raiders? Is it just my server? Are there still servers out there where players like this exist?

/steps off his gnomish yellow pages book.