Why not kill Deathwing?

I'm not concerned with Deathwing's demise.

I'm not sure if I haven't been paying as much attention during leveling, but I don't have any feelings toward this world-changing upstart at all. It's almost the opposite. Thanks to Deathwing, I get to fly around Azeroth and witness some major scenery changes in the old world. He helped bring heroic versions of Deadmines, an instance I always liked and spent a lot of time running.
I have only leveled my main character to 85, but I didn't seem to learn too much about the black dragon supposedly bent on world destruction.

This is quite a change from the Wrath of the Lich King for me. As I leveled Morkk to 80, many quests gave me Arthas' backstory and I didn't like what he was becoming. I started a death knight, like everyone else, and absolutely loved that storyline. I was surprised by how much I wanted to kill the Lich King for telling me I was nothing and he was the next best thing to sliced bread. By the end of that chain, I was more than ready to off the big guy himself.

Of course, I had to wait. As others have commented, we got to storm all the way up to Icecrown Citadel and then turn around and fly off to Ulduar. Just you wait, you evil man, we'll be back for you. Then we had to prove that we were up for the challenge, which was a step I didn't mind, before getting a shot at Arthas himself.

Granted I don't raid much, and didn't spend much time in Ulduar or ToC until I needed gear for Icecrown. Mostly, I didn't care about those raids. But when the ICC 5-man instances showed up, I was all over those. They offered tougher fights than heroics at the time, and added even more to my quest to hunt down the Lich King. Plus, I got gear to help me be less of a smear against the floor in ICC.

In the end, I had plenty of reasons to want to see Arthas dead. Unfortunately, my guild and I weren't skilled enough to tackle him and I didn't get to see him drop. (Now, I have a new guild and am level 85, so you can't avoid death forever, Arthas.)

But in Cataclysm, I don't have that passion against Deathwing. It was interesting to see some folks from vanilla instances come back and the effects they had on the world, but I don't really see Deathwing as a threat.
I plan to pay more attention as I level up my death knight, but right now, I don't see myself caring if Deathwing lives or dies.

Does anyone think the "World Destroyer" needs to go down?

Blizzard should hand out skill with epic gear

While it's nice for us casual players to have easier access to better gear, I think it would be a better idea to offer more opportunities to learn group skills at an earlier time.

Epic gear falling from the heavens is fun, but without skill, it just leads to a nice-looking corpse.

With my shaman, I leveled as Restoration. Granted, I'm cheap and didn't want to pay the cost to respec, but I leveled that way because I knew that I wanted to heal in raids. I put my wife's paladin into Protection and that's the way we learned our characters. (We also named them Morkk and Mindey after the TV show for anyone who remembers that one.)

Leveling in restoration helped me understand my spells better and learn to use more of them reflexively. Granted, it took longer to level, but it was worth it. I have received many complements about my healing in random groups I have joined.

When dual specs were released, I shelled out the 1k gold to make an Elemental spec. (I still don't know how I justified that when I refused a 5g respec cost.) But I quickly found that I wasn't as proficient with the spells and had a lot of learning. The basics are the same, but the talents specific to elemental shamen were foreign to me. Practice has helped me develop my DPS a bit, but I still feel more comfortable healing with occasional DPS. I imagine the reverse would be true for future tanks and healers leveling in a DPS spec.

If players had more opportunities to tank or heal before reaching max level, I think we would see more skill develop as players are more familiar with their abilities. We need a better way to train tanks and healers than trial by fire, usually resulting in a great many wipes.

I can work on my DPS rotation with the training dummies, but they offer nothing for the two most difficult jobs in a group.But the static training dummies don't do much to prepare raiders. Even DPS rarely get to stand around in a raid.

Blizzard already offers multiple zones for leveling up, so it would just be a matter of having two ways to do it.

For example, in Cataclysm they will likely have two 81-82 zones. One would be easily soloable, but not offer as much experience, meaning it would take longer to level.

The second zone could be more challenging and have a good share of 3-man group quests that offer more experience. Going through solo would be very challenging, but innovative and hardcore players could do it. It would also offer an incentive for group play before the level cap rather than random group quests (which I believe are largely ignored anyway).

Blizzard already offers separate zones for the same level areas. This would just make the zones actually different, rather than changing the quests so you gather 8 acorns instead of 8 wolf tails.