They will cave if they are smart. There's no reason to waste that much dev time for such a small % of the population. Hard and Easy switches and you please both crowds.
I seriously am curious how much money their website takes to run.
You can set up something really cheap... $5 for the server per month. Most CMS software is free, but if you want you can pay a small fee for forum software... which can cost maybe $100 a year. Total: $160 a _year_.
They keep...
To be fair, none of thecurrent, pre announcement,LFR crowd I have seen complains about missing set bonuses. It's normally "gold again ;(" and loot drop rates are one thing they are tweaking.
I don't think the battle.net client (blizzard steam) is the announcement (slightly delayed atm?). I would guess it will be a mobile game. We shall see next weekend.
Does Echidna become less useful later on in the game? She makes farming really quick early, but her leader skill doesn't seem like it will scale well late game.