Are group members in an instance group entitled to the disenchanter's services?

With the announcement of the way the new loot system will work in patch 3.3, the wow.com comment section was in a flurry of people debating whether groups are entitled to an enchanter disenchanting their blues. As an enchanter, I can personally relate to this issue: enchanting is not a cheap profession to level, and because enchanting recipes aren't rare these days, we can't charge what we used to be able to charge for them. As such, the main use of our profession becomes making shards out of the unwanted blues in heroics. Many enchanters feel this is unfair, for herbalists aren't expect to share the herbs they gather from herb nodes within dungeons, and ditto for miners with nodes and skinners with bodies. Is this fair? That is the question I want to consider today.

It is important to remember that, unlike the gathering professions, enchanters are taking items that players could otherwise use. If you have a group with no herbalists and you pass by an herb in a dungeon, it makes no difference to your group that it is there at all. If, however, you do a dungeon run with no enchanters, you can sell the blues for a few quick gold. (It's not much, but this ring sells for about five gold, for example) As such, when an enchanter rolls greed on every BoP drop in an instance (as most do to make the process easier), he is denying the other members of the group potential gain, something that does not happen when an herbalist takes an herb. As such, if the disenchanter gives everyone in the group the same chance to gain the item as him by rolling greed along with them, then they have no claim to any shards he gets from disenchanting the items. However, by greeding on the pieces for the purpose of DE'ing them, the disenchanter does in fact owe it to the group to give them back the shards. (Of course, since I tend to get the lowest role, I am always considering keeping a shard for myself, no matter what the roles are. But I digress.)

Still, I have not considered the question of whether the group is entitled to the enchanter's services. Does the enchanter owe it to the group to disenchant its unused BoP items into shards to give back to them? From a purely practical standpoint, he certainly does. Dream shards sell for abut 10 or 15 gold on my realm, much more than a player can get by selling the gear to a vendor (except in rare cases, like 2H weapons). Of course, there is the issue of simply taking the effort to disenchant the item, but this won't be a concern after patch 3.3.

That said, one issue I saw brought up a lot in the comments on the wow.com post was that the inclusion of the new disenchant option on the new loot interface took away the enchanter's choice. Enchanters will no longer have a choice as to whether their profession is taken advantage of, and many enchanters in the comments section of the post were quite indignant that the widespread taken-for-granted-ness of our profession, one that is incredibly expensive to level, is now being institutionalized. To this I say, so what? Yes, disenchanting is probably the most under-appreciated profession-related job in the game, but we aren't going to change that by being stingy with our services.

To those angry enchanters, try to think about it this way: when you enchant someone's gear, how frequently do you do so with your own mats? How frequently do you do with theirs? The fact is that most of our business is done with people who buy their mats off of the AH, and where do they get their mats? Us. Even if you withhold your disenchanting services out of hope to raising the prices of dream shards, other enchanters will gladly disenchant stuff for people, keeping the market flooded. Point is, there is no point in withholding disenchanting services, and though we won't have a choice after patch 3.3, there is no point in doing it now.