I don't think they really intended for reforging to be such a big deal... but in the face of the higher raid difficulty in Cata and the overwhelming lack of incentive to run heroics it suddenly became the most important way to hit caps and min/max, and everything just ballooned from there.
I don't like how much work goes into getting a new piece of gear now, but I also don't want to live in a world where I just *can't* use a weapon as a tank because it has crit on it. There's probably a happy medium that mostly involves removing a lot of the enchants that go on gear, but I can see that having a pretty big backlash.
I think hit/expertise/dodge/parry are going to be on the chopping block, and I'll bet they rework active mitigation to take crit into mind for tank classes that don't benefit from crit now. I just don't see them removing enchants/gemming because of the profession backlash.
And for all the vanilla/bc nostalgia, I do sincerely believe the community was at i's best in the vanilla days. But I'll fully admit to probably being blinded by nostalgia.