Naxxramas

[Raelynn]

I think that you're missing one piece, which is that the 20-man dungeons are really catered to a group that's halfway between the hardcore raiders and the purely casual player.  Blizzard developer comments prior to the release of ZG suggested that they recognized the popularity of UBRS raids and recognized that there was room for dungeons in between UBRS and MC/BWL.  Obviously, no, if you are a pure casual player who only logs on for a few hours a week, then ZG will be out of reach.  However, if you play more than a few hours a week, it is reasonable that one could get in a semi-casual guild that meets a couple times a week to take on the 20-man dungeons.
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Though people seem to think 20-man dungeons were a step between raiders and casuals, they in fact were a step between the 5-10 man and 40-man. Blizzard even stated at one point when people were complaining about the difficulty of parts of ZG that it wasn't meant to be a stepping stone in terms of difficulty and time, but more for just organizing the number of people and coordinating and such.

They are there really for raiders that can't get the numbers, rather than the people that can't put in the time, or for the people that purely don't want to raid.

In my opinion, the only reason that 1.10 wasn't Naxx was that Blizzard actually listened to the people in the forums, went "Oh man they're right. We haven't put in progression for non-raiders since dire maul. They need something". It was an extreme lack of foresight. They plugged raid instances (whether they be 20 or 40 man) into the pipeline, and didn't realize that the other content would be lacking due to this.