Naxxramas

[Monkey]

That doesn't jive with reality or the developer comments I have read.  ZG is quite easy compared to 40-man content.  The first four bosses are jokes.  The tiger and panther bosses take some coordination, but once you get the hang of them, they're easy. 
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Mongo's right if he's referring to BWL/AQ as "40-man content". MC is a big problem though, because it isn't a progression in difficulty from ZG or AQ20, but the rewards are a progression in quality. For example, Venoxis is similar in difficulty to Lucifron. Lucifron drops T1 boots and gloves and Venoxis drops blues--who do you want to fight?

WoW's a big game and there are a lot of factors involved here with a common central theme of Progression. The reason that anyone plays any RPG is to progress and develop their character(s). In an MMORPG, people also enjoy progressing and developing an overall group of friends.

Blizzard came to retail with this baseline:
0. Scholo, Strat, BRD (5-man, Tier 0)
0. BRS (10/15 man, Tier 0)
0. Molten Core/Onyxia (40-man, Tier 1 and Tier 2)

And their development pipeline has produced something like this:
1. Dire Maul (5-man, Tier 0+)
2. BWL (40-man, Tier 2)
3. Battlegrounds (Multiple, PvP rewards)
4. ZG (20-man, Tier 0+ and Tier 1), AB (1-20 man, PvP rewards)
5. Silithus (solo, 5-man, Tier 0)
6. AQ (20-man, 40-man, Tier 1+ and Tier 2+)
7. Tier 0.5 (5-man, Tier 0 and Tier 1)

The progression for solo players is barely there; mostly it consists of PvP and various rep grinds. The ilevel ranges from T0-T1.

The progression for 5-man groups has been almost flat in terms of content. That isn't to say that items aren't available, but that it's really been picking up scraps along the way and the ilevel has still remained fairly constant in a range from T0-T1.

The progression for groups larger than 5 has also had problems. For 10 months your option was to (re)run UBRS, to (re)cheese the 5-man instances, or force your group to grow to fit MC. No one makes 25 new friends overnight, so you end up needing a more 'corporate' infrastructure and organization. That's the basis for the shadow endgame, what could be called the 'middle management' endgame. Now that there's finally ZG and AQ, smaller groups can step up and get ilevel gear around T1+.

The progression for full raid groups has been fairly decent (although it has stalled and frustrated raiders in some cases. On my first server, the early MC guilds collapsed while waiting for BWL; their players got bored after 'finishing' WoW). The ilevel now ranges from T1-T2+

As you look across those four groups, consider the average incremental delay in expanding content. If Field Duty represents the first improvement to solo content, that means solo players had to wait a year to step up. Similar delays for 5-man, about half that for small raids, and half again for raiders. In short, it's not the amount of content that I think bothers people (there are equal numbers of 5-man and 40-man endgame instances), it's the time between progressive steps in that content.