There are still possibilities for 40-man raids still.
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Let's keep things in perspective here. There is a very small percentage of players who have defeated every raid boss in this game consistently for five years straight now. That kind of experience is unparalleled. There's also a very thick system of online resources for providing and sharing strategies which were not nearly as robust for the original game as they are today. The community that's grown around this game has somewhat changed the way the game is played. That's okay though. That's natural.
The fact that at least 25 members of our player base have killed Sindragosa on Heroic difficulty doesn't say much about whether or not the encounter is more complicated than, say, Twin Emperors. In fact, most of the raiders I've talked to who are at, or have killed the Lich King in 25-player mode say that Icecrown Citadel has provided some of the most fun and interesting mechanics this game has yet to offer. Most of the fights today are technically more complex than the fights of old, but the difference is in the tuning and the polish.
I can think of at least a couple of bosses that took a long time for any guild to kill where bugs were a major factor. As soon as the bugs were fixed, the bosses were defeated. There were also several bosses, take Princess Huhuran for example, which weren't necessarily incredibly challenging from a mechanic perspective. The challenge came in the form of requiring that players farm resistance gear from that same instance for weeks and weeks until they stood a chance. Resistance fights have since more or less disappeared. We want the interesting mechanics of a fight and the fun factor of that fight to be what players remember, not that they had to wait for major bugs to get fixed, or farm enough of a specific type of stat to even stand a chance. Of course there are gear checks still in the game, but they're much more reasonable. They allow you to customize your character to your wishes and prove your talent by successfully performing your class/spec role, while also successfully learning and reacting to the mechanics of each fight. These are areas in which guilds like the one to which you're referring excel to an impressive degree.[/ Course anyone who visits mmo-champion daily would know of such things.
I'm not disagreeing that blizz has sold out for a bigger audience.
But try to understand that the game is growing and blizz is still fixing and trying new techniques.
With vWoW I would say that it only seemed difficult because there wasn't an extensive knowledge on the game as well as how people knew how to play. (But I could be wrong, I never got far in progression back then) But if you look at all the proggression, for each expansion you will notice that that progression difficulty always scaled linerally. Also, with blizzard recycling abilities in different encounters, it gives players more understanding of the higher end boss fights.
@Crowd control
Yes blizzard has stated that they didn't take much use of CC in wrath dungeons. Reasoning for this because they believe they overhauled the amount of CC used in BC. They plan on making a change in Cataclysm. In dungeons it will be every few pulls will require a CC, it helps keep up awareness and keeps the aspect of strategy in instances.
With gear stats getting overpowered, they'll be fixing that in Cataclysm as well. They're getting rid of bonus stats on gear such as +def rating, +crit rating, +spell power, etc. Also, they're changing talent trees to rid of passive talents and making it more of utility talents. While specing in a tree will give you "proper stats" for your role, such as bonus crit, defense, and such.
Overall it appears that Cataclysm will be a complete revamp of the game, seeming to use a whole different system. I could be wrong and the game could become even more easier, or as hoped, will increase difficulty or challenge thinking.
As to end this, there's a quote that I feel is relevant to WoW.
Easy to pick up, a life time to master. 
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