#1 - Nov. 30, 2011, 1:17 p.m.
The Raid Finder is designed to allow players who don't often have the time to commit to a regular raiding schedule a chance at seeing the latest content. With that said, we don't want players who might fall into this category to skip the new five-player dungeons altogether for the Dragon Soul raid, hence the high item level requirement.
Raid Finder is below normal and Heroic modes in terms of rewards and difficulty, but the new tier of five-player dungeons should still be stepping stones into the raid.
It shouldn't take the average player "hundreds of hours" to gear up for the Raid Finder version of Dragon Soul, as the Dungeon Finder will quite quickly ramp up your power and gear score.
Why has this feature not been implemented for the older raids?
Implementing the Raid Finder was actually quite a monumental technical feat. We want all future raids to be designed with this third difficulty incorporated, but it'd take quite a bit of time and resources to retrofit the feature into previous raids. In an ideal world that would've happened, but the patch would not have come out this year. And that wasn't an investment we felt would really be ideal in the grand scheme of things.