Conflicting game desgin uses

I'm quite certain there are plenty of situations where our game design is apparently in conflict. :) However, to address this specific point:

There are alternatives to the valor gear on the rep vendors. There was no alternative to the head enchants.

Furthermore, if you decide to pursue say Shado-Pan rep, you'll find some items that your class or spec can use (provided you don't already have a better item, etc.) With the head enchants, you felt like you had to follow the one for your spec (casters had to go Hyjal for example). If you thought that another faction was more interesting or fun, you had to give up your head enchant to pursue it, at least initially.

The broader topic, probably beyond the scope of this thread, though I suspect the one you're really getting at, is that we need to balance the desires of players who want to play WoW sporadically with those who want to have more to do. We heard loud and clear from players in Cataclysm that there wasn't enough for them to do: there weren't enough optional activities once they finished the core ones of leveling and perhaps raiding and PvP. We tried to add plenty to Mists.

However, if an activity is too optional, then it doesn't count. For example, you could level up every profession on one character. You can try to get every achievement. That motivates some players, but not enough: the reward for that effort just isn't there. Hitting Revered Shado-Pan does have some great rewards, but you can earn somewhat competitive items from crafting, raiding or PvP. You can also choose to then pursue Exalted Shado-Pan which we consider even more optional because it offers cosmetic or vanity rewards instead of power rewards.

This is a cop-out. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I read this from a company that has claimed it believes giving players options to enjoy the game the way they want suddenly saying that options are a bad thing and shouldn't "count".

I think you're taking that out of context. For the players saying "I want something to do after I finish my raid for the week," providing them very optional content (the examples I used were maxing out professions or achievements) isn't something that fits the bill for them. Telling them they can always find something to do if they try hard enough would be fairly considered a cop-out. They want some kind of directed gameplay with a sense of character progression.

Options as a general philosophy are a great thing. We love options and we have tried to provide lots of options for max level players to progress their characters, such as scenarios, challenge modes, Raid Finder and daily quest hubs, in addition to options you've always had, such as dungeons, PvP and professions, and some new types of content that aren't tied to character progression, most obviously pet battles.

we never want players to feel locked in to a character so we are making things account wide!

*locks vp gear behind rep grinds that are not account wide*

That's a tricky balance to strike. At the end of the day, the reason most players make alts is to have additional characters to play. I could just as easily say "I feel locked to my priest because she has so much better gear than my rogue. I should be able to give any gear I pick up to my rogue and I should be able to share valor and conquest points among all my characters." Or you can take it to a silly extreme "I already leveled up one character to 90, so I shouldn't have to do it for a second character." That really isn't that different from saying you don't want to do the level 90 quest content a second time.

As I've said before, we don't think leveling an alt (and by "leveling" in this context I am technically including all of the progression you need to do to max out a character including level 90 content) needs to take as long as leveling your first character, but it should take some amount of time. Maybe we're erring on the side of being too conservative, but it's always easier to make game rules more forgiving than it is to tighten them up. (Players like gaining power and freedom by they hate to lose it.)

For example, a compromise might be that you could buy an item at Exalted level that you could mail to an alt to give them a headstart. Maybe we re-introduce the tabards, but at Exalted level, but have them only work on quests, not dungeons, and make them bind-to-account to help a second character. Maybe it's okay to have factions be shared across accounts the way mounts and achievements are, but currency should only stay on the character who earned them. Or maybe it's the currency that should be BOA and not the factions. (Those are just brainstorming ideas -- not announcements.)

If you've ever worked in a large company before as part of a development team, you've probably been in the situation where you come up with a great idea, work hard at making it a reality and then have management come back at you saying "Thanks for all the hard work but we decides things will be like this instead. Make it happen".

Our management doesn't work that way. You can blame me for anything you don't like about the game.

But, if you're saying that you like to play WoW by just running raids and nothing else or you expect your alts to be as powerful as your mains without having to actually play them, then that is going counter for the direction we're taking for Mists. I'm trying to explore a little bit in this thread what some players are looking for. You can consider the Golden Lotus faction to essentially be another questing zone (Vale of Eternal Blossoms in fact) but a maximum level zone for reputation instead of leveling zone for experience. Players don't often suggest that they should be able to skip whole leveling zones, even on alts, so I want to understand the desire to skip over this content. If the issue is just that "faction grind" and "daily quests" leave a bad taste in your mouth from previous experiences, then that's totally reasonable, but give us a chance to show you how much better these new ones are.