They did raise the Q prices to a higher level than I like, but the only thing you have to have Merc Gear or better on are Cosmics. (My ranged TK toon only has has Mercenary Gear and he was consistently placing in the top ten in the Snake Gulch Mechanon Event that recently ran.)
Not everyone is going to love everything about a game. In COX I did not care to run the Incarnate Raids, but there were dozens-- hundreds-- of people who loved that sort of thing.
It's not so much what is a minimum in theory but what becomes a minimum by unwritten rules in mmorpgs. For instance, guild wars 1 you had to have rank 3 in heroes ascent to play heroes ascent. In order to get that rank requires playing heroes ascent. Why? Because players forced it for a time. This created a cruel catch 22 for newcomers.
The same tends to happen in raid content, I wouldn't be surprised if butt-heads ask for people to have justice gear for the cosmic raids. A given most people wouldn't be that stupid, but I've seen communities shove catch-22's on others before like that. It's the second worst form of elitism(the forum cartel behavior Angel Phoenix77 speaks of tops that many times over).
But elitism in general goes hand-in-hand with forum cartel behavior to, even if it qualifies as scrub-like(that is, getting nerfs to anything they don't like and only buffing there own stuff). Heck i don't even count the raids as proper challenging gameplay design, because it's only there for munchkins who just wanna make themselves uber, rather than challenge(as in hard but also fair) in the rest of the game from 1-40 which CO has lacked for years.
It isn't just the game or a small bit of content that drives me away from it. It's also the behavior of those players who have the devs ear which drive sensible players away from it in combination. I even made a post recently about it. CO is a sum of it's parts, not just the game itself but it's community. Since it's forum cartel have made the game only for them and got everything else nerfed into uselessness, well there is a reason so few people actually care for CO anymore at all.
In short in my post: CO's content has always been dry and based exclusively on pop culture references. It played a lot like WoW in quest content. The game didn't even mask that it's a game. The game treated the player character like a mary sue, and the overall content was very, very easy for anyone using optimal powers(while difficult for others for the wrong reasons). The game got easier for all, except maybe archtypes but even then, power creep made it even easier. This complete lack of challenge caused many players to become more anti-social as there was no incentive to ask for help or help others.
Combined with the game treating you like a mary sue, I feel it created many of the forum cartels we see, although I heard some were deplorable even before CO and had to be ran out of the forums. Ultimately though, they began to become excessively arrogant wanting extreme hard content exclusively for themselves and balance changes made to effect the rest of the game to make everyone play only like them. A lot of them turned narcissistic and SHFGish/scrubish. In the end, CO became the game it is today, a money-hungry scam which is only run by a forum cartel everyone knows to be scrubs/shfg's.
And I don't mind hard and challenging(hard but fair and skill based) gameplay, but when it's made exclusively for a few shfg's, screw it. Thats more in the category of punishing(unfair, trial error based, that is hard but unfair). SHFG's/scrubs of mmorpgs love it when they are the only ones who succeed in things and out-right hate when others can with effort and learning. And that separates the CO raid content from CoX's incarnate trials; CoX's incarnate trials were made to be challenging and for everyone to be able to beat them if they were willing to learn. Only the underground trial failed at that. CO's raid content is more "There is only one strategy and we will make sure everyone only plays exactly one way and it's holy trinity like every other mmorpg hahaha!".
In contrast, CoX the opposite happened, it's community grew and evolved and became both stronger and it's individuals were better overall. I'll let people find the post though rather than share here, if you want I'll share only in private message. The reason is I figure some CO deplorables would come here as they sometimes do. I will say though, it's far to late for CO to do anything, because the community it has now? It's stuck with em, if it tries to turn itself around it'd have to get rid of them. They certainly won't let that happen.