Simply Inconvenient or Complexly Convenient

A new item drops and you win the roll or bid. It is now yours. Also, you are a developer with mad skills and right now, at this very second, you can rewrite the item enhancement system.

Would you rather have one enchant that is hard to get or an enchant, a few gems, reforging, and possibly the same to a few other items?

You may have noticed that I am presenting a false choice. That is intentional. I'm trying to look at two extremes, without all that messy middle ground and picking and choosing individual features. I can do that in other posts.

You may also have noticed that this is essentially comparing the vanilla enchanting system with the current one. Before LK there were no vellum, so when enchanters wanted to sell their services, they had to interact face to face with the customer. This was inconvenient for everyone involved, plus the trade spammers had to deal with people spamming trade looking for enchants or customers. Add lockboxes, UBRS keys, and portals to the mix and it's no wonder we needed a global LFG channel for our spam chat.

Contrast this with the current system in which we can easily get our gems and enchants off the AH and the reforging trainers aren't so far away. The needed materials are not so rare as to be impossible to find, in the rare case that you need a crafter. Whereas essence of air required a flight from Orgrimmar all the way to Silithus. And then there were the shoulder and leg enchants, which rather than being crafted or from a simple if slow rep grind, instead required raids of one sort or another, excluding a generic resist enchant which merely required a simple if slow rep grind, plus a simple if slow mob grind (unless you planned ahead and combined them).
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If you somehow missed it, Spinks had a recent post on this.

Am I really the only person who would prefer to be able to just grab a cool drop and be ready to go without being asked to do all the legwork for an extra minor bonus? It’s funny, once I used to find these extra complexities so cool. I think that I’m over it now, or at least I’ve done it over again in enough games that I’d rather just cut to the chase.

Note that when the only deficiency on a new item was an enchant, upgrades were upgrades on the spot, so you could use it right away, even if you were going to eventually go get it enchanted. Now the lack of gems and enchant will make fresh off the boss gear usually worse than existing gear. Also thanks to jewelcrafting, and reinforced by reforging, having the proper caps has become more important than it used to be, mostly because back then we didn't have the option to dramatically change our gear.

You might have assumed that I agree that it is annoying to have to regem, reforge, and reenchant before even considering using a new item.

Don’t forget to regem and reforge all your other gear since now you’re above or below a necessary stat cap.

Here’s what is strange to me: back when we only had to get enchants, it was harder to find enchanters. No scrolls on the AH, so we’d end up in major cities looking for them. Half the time we’d have to go farm some special mat like essences of air or crusader orbs. It was an altogether inconvenient system.

Now it is all very conveniently placed on the AH: gems and enchants, or nearby at the reforging elf. And yet it feels more annoying.

Well you'd be right.

Note that I am not using complex to indicate difficulty, just that it adds more steps and stuff to manage.

So given the false choice of liberty or death, I mean no-scroll enchanting-only or easy but complex gems, reforging, and enchants, which would you prefer?

P.S. I noticed that I never quite explicitly stated that one of the assumptions of the no-scroll enchanting is also that gear wouldn't take us near enough to hit/expertise caps for us to worry about being a bit high or low: we'd just always be low.