Sounds to me more like WoW is just adding more munchkining to an already overmunchkined game.
Depends on your view. If all you care about is access to more powerful items, then yes, the new model is more "Munchkin". But I put it to you that items are a red herring. The opportunity to see new content is the actual draw, or should be.
The original model for WoW was a very aggressive time sink. You level to 60. 5% or so of people successfully make the transition to endgame content, which is half the game and 90% of the interesting content. The other 95% of players either stop playing or go level another class. Or do something entirely inane like farm materials just so they can sell them on the AH for imaginary gold.
That model sucks for everyone who's not in the top 5%. It also sucks for a large percentage of that 5% because there's this inflated sense of competition between guilds leads to all kinds of anti-social behavior.
The PnP comparison would be this: You're only allowed to level past level 10 if you and 5 other people are willing and able to play in a Living Campaign 3-6 nights a week. If you lose one of the 5 people in your group, they take away your books until you get a new person, and that person has to level up "naturally" before they'll give you your books back.
Why people defend that as a fun model I'll never know.
The new WoW model means 95% of the people get to see a large percentage of the endgame content. But there's still a tiered system that favors the hardcore gamer, but if you're willing to put in a night or two a week with your casual friendly guild or a couple nights a week with some PUGs, you should be able to see most or all of the fights in at least some version. Plus, my wife and I can log in with our characters and simply get into a dungeon with some random people quickly, if we feel like a dungeon. Used to be the only ways to do that were arduous, and you spent more time assembling the group than running the content. And that just for a 5-man. I used to lead 40, 20, 25, and 10 man raids across Vanilla, BC, and early LK. The people herding necessary was anti-fun. Spending months stroking egos and shuffling schedules in order to get a cohesive enough group to reliably down bosses..... ugh. Yeah, first kills on Vashj and Kael pre-nerf were pretty dandy rushes of happy brain chemicals, but for every one of those there way a Huhuran that wasn't even fun when we won. And there were always those nights where we look at the group we've managed to field and say.... "We're screwed." At least now we would be able to look at the group and decide amongst the officers "This group can handle hard modes" or "This group needs to do regular mode and pray."
It has all kinds of new problems. The dungeon finder is a mechanical success and a social disaster. Raid PUGs are quashing a great many of the casual guilds entirely. But "letting your playerbase see at least some version of all the content you spent 3 years designing" is a rather different proposition than "Munchkinism" on the face of it.
