Self-Reinforcing Cataclysm Subscriber Speculation

Over in the comments at Spinks' place, a blog-less poster named Simon Jones suggests that we're all treating news of WoW's subscriber blip as vindication that our personal complaints about the game are felt universally, and are responsible for the decline.  Fair enough.

My personal pre-conceived concerns about Cataclysm are:

1. That the solo leveling content that Blizzard spent so much effort on is too easy to be fun for people who actually like solo leveling because group players need to be able to get it over with quickly to reach the cap.  
2. That the opportunity cost of spending all that time on low level content was less content available at max level.  (This causes several additional problems - for example, dungeon difficulty gets harder to manage with fewer dungeons and therefore less room for difficulty tiers.)  

I would elaborate further, but Eric at Elder Game has done a pretty good job of beating me to these points. 

The interesting question is not what everyone with a blog thinks, but what other MMO developers think when they see Blizzard throwing cataclysmic amounts of money at revamping the neglected mid-game only to have endgame players run out of content and quit at a faster rate.  My guess is that the odds of anyone else trying anything as ambitious as Cataclysm in the near future just went down.