I'm going to defend my poor innocent heavily armored vehicles
To B's point, how fun is it for me to press 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 1 1 1 4 and 3 when one of my addons lights up all day, been doing it for 3 years now, so pressing 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 and 5 when a different addon tells me too isn't a whole bunch of difference from my perspective.
You can't blame grid for vehicles being shit, I've seen loads of people do that, i use the standard wow interface for them and i have no problems at all targeting stuff, grid being crap isn't blizzards fault.
With regards to being good at the mini-game thing, it is a similar thing the to gorefiend mini-game, some people simply were an awful lot better at it than others, i don't know how much being good at it made you a better player, personally i was terrible at it, but like it has been said in the mage forums, being good at the game isn't just your ability to get your numbers higher than other peoples numbers.
As far as depth of gem/enchanting go, I just pick whatever enchant and gems give me the most SP while keeping my hit at max. The perception of choice is an illusion as far as that is concerned. Sure i have the choice to put 40 stamina on my bracers, but i'm not going to because it will be rubbish for a mage. The choice is there if you are sufficiently uninterested in making your character the best it can be, but as soon as you are the number of 'choices' you have with regards to items quickly falls apart.
I guess i'm going to be on the losing side here, it's similar to those racing quests for the netherwing rep back at 70, personally i thought they were really well done and it was nice to have something other than my ability to mash 1 and avoid fire tested. I don't remember many people agreeing with me though.
I'm in no position to judge against Hom's point as i simply don't know how hard it is to balance a game of this size, although i will say that it's 1 boss out of 14, so they put in the effort with the rest of them (hopefully).
I guess I love the vehicles cos it offers something totally different, because tbh if ulduar turns out to be another 'don't stand in fire' instance like BT was, then the game will no longer offer me any enjoyment whatsoever.