These days new level 80's start raiding the very instant they reach endgame, often not even doing a single dungeon before, raiding with shitty gear is socially acceptable.
The problem with T1+W1 in my opinion is that players spend several months (1-80+T1/2) not learning anything about the game. Many players simply gear up to T2 raid gear and are still pretty clueless as most players learn extremly little about the game.
The learning curve to get into hardmodes becomes much bigger than it really has to be.
Noone cares if you do extremly bad dps, or if you can't tank as a soldier in T1/W1. Rogues can have as little as 6% hit rating in Full T2 gear, which is too little to guarantee you can remove abilities on hardmode bosses.
What the game need instead is some sort of progression that teaches the players the stuff they need to know past T2 in a better way, and also reward them with gear with usefull stats (critigation ammount, heal rating, hit rating etc,depending on class).
I'm pretty sure that a lot of players simply drop out of the game after T2 because the learning curve to get into hardmodes is too great, that could be tanking, low dps, or removing Burn Skin etc.
The players who only do the raids each week, also have very little content per week, NM Khitai dungeons are not that popular since you can earn like 12 tokens a day in solo dungeons, and few have time to do that many NM dungeons so solo dungeons are more rewarding.
Vorbiz Edit: Removed profanities