Fear of the Unknown?

I've posted a poll, over on the Munqui Tribe forums, for our members to have a say on where our official guild raiding goes from here.
The officers often discuss these issues, behind the scenes, but at the end of the day it's not just 'our' guild, although we try not to let too much riff-raff in.

The current raid teams are either already, or soon about to, get bored of running Naxx 10.
We've cleared it, a few times now, and the challenge just doesn't seem to be there anymore. This isn't a bad thing, it's just natural progression.

So where do we go from here?

In my view, it's time we started at least trying to do 25 man raids. And so we have a poll to ask all the non-officers (and officers too I suppose) what they want to do.
The general opinion seems to be split almost 50/50.

Everyone loves the fun of 25 mans, and they're obviously much more social events than the 10 man runs. But people seem to be very wary of them. And I can't help feeling that they just don't understand what it's all about.

When WoW first came out, back in the days where level 60 was the cap, Raiding was only for the elite few. The small percentage of hardcore players who had the time, and patience to reach the pinnacle of the game. I can't remember what the actual percentage of the population of the game ever saw this content, but lets just say, it wasn't very many.

When TBC arrived, Blizz opeend up the idea of entry-level raiding. Why should all the effort they put into the raid dungeons only be accesible to a tiny percentage of the players. For one thing, it excludes people, and for another it's not very cost-effective. And Blizz are in this for the money at the end of the day.
So they introduced 'Heroics' which were designed to be a stepping-stone into raiding, and Karazahn, which was manageable once you were geared with all the drops from heroics. The progression paths were clear.
You hit 80, then you got good gear from regular dungeons / crafting. You then did heroics. Once your gear was good enough, you could do Kara. After that things fell down a little, as Kara was 10-man and the next raids in the progression were 25 man, so it was hard for non-hardcore players to go any further. Blizz realised this.

So with WotLK Blizz have gone the step further, there is now a 10-man and 25 man version of every new raid. So smaller guilds and non-hardcore players can finally reach the parts of the game that they couldn't previously.
But they also changed the progression structure. No longer do you need to grind through Regulars -> Heroics -> Raids.
These days a fresh-faced level 80 can enter Naxx with the gear they buy from the AH, or from emblem drops that are easy to come by, or from rep vendors (with rep that is now also much simpler to achieve).

In a way, this is a curse and a blessing. Raiding just got easy. On the plus side, it means that it's no longer for the elite few, and many more people can enjoy it. But on the negative side, it means that it's no longer for the elite few, and many more people can enjoy it.... Yeah, i know I typed that sentence twice, it was intentional.

So, no longer, is raiding only for the elite. And not only are the 10 man raids possible for non-epic'd players, but the 25 mans are too. Blizz didn't just take the nerf-bat to the raids, they took a bloody great nerf-sledgehammer to them.

That's right, the 25 mans are now an alternative to the 10 mans. You don't "progress" to them anymore. Almost as soon as you're capable of handling the 10 mans, you can also start playing in the 25 mans.

Don't get me wrong, the better the gear you have the easier you'll find it, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. And considering you can buy fantastic epics and t7 items with tokens dropped from heroics it's easy to give yourself a head start.
We that have been raiding 10-man Naxx collect those exact same tokens. Not special 'raid' tokens that give us an advantage.

So if you were a guild new to raiding, and had the membership numbers, the ideal thing to do would be heorics to get enough basic gear, and then go straight to 25 man runs.

In our case, we have about 19 members who are raid-hardened, almost fully epic'd, and very well co-ordinated (most of the time). Those 19 players could easily take on many of the 25 man bosses alone. They wouldn't even need an extra 6 players... But if there's spaces going spare, why not fill them.

The rewards from 25-man raiding are much greater than 10-mans. 10-mans these days are essentially just heroics with more players, and bigger dungeons (or dungeon, since there's only 1 so far).
When Ulduar arrives you'll need to be pretty well geeared and experienced in Naxx before you can cut it there, but it's not going to be the great leap into the unknown that some of our non-raiders think it is.

I feel that even some of our current raiders are scared of the "big-bad" (to coin a phrase from an ex-cheerleader), and that was defeated at the end of the last series.

Despite everything I wrote above, there's always a downside, and here it is. We need more players. It's not the end of the world if we don't get the full 25, but we would need more commitment from our guildies.