Summary up to this point:
-Said addons originally designed in order to allow guilds and friends to help each other.
-Elitist Jerks (not the theorycrafters, but the actual jerks) misusing addons is bad.
-Something should be done, but no one really knows what.
I'm in agreement that it is too easy to obtain "epic" gear. Yet, the fact that someone does not have 'perplz' should not be a factor in judging how good they are with the class.
For high-end raids I can understand the need for prerequisites, but the subject seems to be heroics and beginning raids.
Everyone seems to have forgotten december 2008. When EVERYONE was running around in greens and blues; and how did we do? Everyone did perfectly fine.
The occasional death in HoL or UP was chalked up to not completely knowing the fights.
Over time as people began farming naxx, voa, os, and maly, the amount of epics in the game grew and grew. The relative cheapness of emblem gear didn't help. Epics no longer feel, well, 'epic'. People only see the color of the item name or item level and base judgements on that.
Case in point - Was working on my shaman alt one day when a well known jerk was looking for another DPS for H-HoL. At the time, I still needed something from there, so I responded.
Neeph has a good set of resto gear (being my main spec) and a set for enhancement made of mostly blues and a green or three.
My resto set was equipped while he did the gear check. I believe his words were, "This group might be ok. everyone's over 2k ilvl."
Only after Loken was dead and I did 2.2k dps overall (2.4k on bosses) did he notice I wasn't in all purples. After a bit of berating about 'deceit' and 'carrying me' did I point out that I beat his guildie in full naxx25 gear by 300 dps.
But that's just one of the countless stories out there.
When running pugs, I always stand up for the "under geared". Having taken a 2 year hiatus from WoW (from between AQ to BT) I can relate to people trying to do easy content and being judged. Anyone that uses an addon to "screen" people from anything but ToC 10/25 or Uld 25 is put on my
Bad Players list.
All in all, that's about the only thing we can do in the short-term to stem the "X-box Live" feel (no offense meant to those decent people that also play on X-box)... not patronize them.