#1 - Oct. 3, 2012, 4:59 p.m.
That being said, Ghostcrawler has stated that they don't want the subsequent grinds to take as long which leads me to believe there is a solution in the works or at least being discussed. As such, I feel this is an opportune time to find an easy to implement "middle ground" as tabard grinding rep stinks. It's too fast, too easy and farmable (more so than dailies) and that's just weak, imo. However, starting out from NEUTRAL and going all the way over and over and over is reasonably tedious as well.
So here's an idea: PARTIAL account bound Mists of Pandaria reputations.
Here's how it would work:
Rep would be account bound BUT (of course there's always a BUT!), it's partial. So the way I envision this working is subsequent characters that start a faction rep automatically start at the beginning of a rep tier two tiers lower than your max reputation character.
For instance:
Let's say Huggywuggles has his Tillers rep all the way up to Exalted. This would mean any other character coming behind him would then automatically start at 0/12000 Honored. There would have to be some restrictions, like the individual reps like you have with the Tillers, but your TILLER rep would work like that.
This would allow a quicker grind for subsequent characters, give THEM some reputation benefits but still encourage them to grind out reputations for the BEST rewards.
So, in short, P.A.B.R. would be, in my humble opinion, the way to go.