The Five Second Rule

[Ruvanal]

But that's the thing: spirit WAS important until just about a month or two left in beta (correct me if I'm off on the timeline).  Blizzard saw how with enough spirit, Priests were too uber, and came up with a way to nerf it.

They didn't have time to adjust the items accordingly.

-Bolty
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Your timeline is in the right area. It was not just priests that were getting a great benefit out of it, the mage could too if they were not blinded by wanting mega INT. My mage had just prior to that change done an Uldaman run and throughout the whole thing I had only to stop and drink 5 or 6 times. During many fights I was actually able to recover mana faster than I was expending in casting spells. It was just a matter of which set of spells I was using; low mana cost spells while tank built some aggro and I gained mana then switch to a quick burst of higher spells to wipe the current target burning only a moderate amount of mana. Then just repeat again for the next mob that was part of the same pull.

"...and came up with a way to nerf it."
The problem is in a sense the same as it usually is with the Blizzard development team. The over compensated when appling a fix. In this case they slapped a diminishing return if you tried to really max out spirit AND reduced the amount of recovery you did get for a set amount of spirit AND added the no mana recover in fight and for 5 seconds after the fight. Too many different things done to reduce spirit in one pass, such that it turned the stat into almost a joke for its usefulness.