Should raiders be angry about the Emblem of Conquest change?

Disclaimer: Everything I say in this post in my own opinion, and though I make sweeping generalizations about raiders in this post, I am not making an assault on your own character with this post. In other words, don't take what I say personally.

The last major patch brought a pretty big change to the game: emblems of conquest now drop from heroic instances. Many raiders who got these emblems the hard way through Ulduar were not happy about this change, as they saw it as trivializing the gear they had worked so hard to obtain. Were they justified? It's a difficult question, but it begs an even bigger one, in my opinion: what is the purpose of gear? After all, the purpose that gear serves is fundamental to how valuable it is.

The way I see it, the only practical application of gear is to make encounters easier and thus allow the player to see more of the game. However, if that were the gear's only purpose, then the Uduar raiders wouldn't feel as indignant about non-raiders sharing their gear. They may feel that Blizzard's making good gear easier to get makes the encounters easier and thus trivialized their achievements, but as Windwalkêrs's recent downing of Yogg-Saron in only blues shows, gear only plays a small role in raid success, and thus making good gear available to more players does little to make the encounters themselves easier. Thus, this could not be the reason that raiders are so indignant about the emblem change.

So, what's the purpose of the gear? Since skill is really more important than gear in determining a player's usefulness to a raid than gear, the only reason left is one that's pretty obvious: the gear is the best way for raiders to show off that they raid and that they raid successfully. Achievements do serve the same function, but they are inferior to gear as a way to show off successful raiding. It's easier for a player to admire his gear than his achievements, and gear is much easier to show off to other players than achievements.

Of course, the idea that gear can be used to show off raiding achievements begs the question of why raiders should want to brag about their conquests at all. This is an easy one to answer; anything that a person puts a lot of work into, that person is going to feel proud of, and pride generally leads to a person wanting to some how show off what they have achieved. Still, many a wise man will tell you that genuine pride results in humility, and only hubristic pride leads to bragging. In fact, those who brag often do so because they have doubt in themselves and need to reaffirm their baseless self-esteem. Whether this theory applies to WoW, I'm not qualified to say, but my suspicion is that it does.

Bringing that all together, are the raiders who want to keep raid gear to themselves selfish? No, they're probably just insecure about their achievements and fear that their gear (which symbolizes their success in raids) becoming more common will somehow trivialize what they have accomplished. Will it? Not really, because gear has nothing to do with what you have achieved. It may symbolize it to you, but that's your own thinking, not that of the player-base as a whole.