Pros and Cons of merging stats in WoW

I've been out of the World of Warcraft loop for a couple months as I went and tried out Age of Conan so I don't always have the most up to date information. I know some of the new talents for each class, but mostly just the ones that have been widely talked about like Titan's Grasp. So it came as a great surprise when I started hearing about Blizzard trying to make gear less class specific by experimenting with item stats. I had known before that paladin talents and itemization were being updated again so that they could share armor with death knights, but I thought that was extent of it.

Instead, I find out that Blizzard announced a couple months ago they were changing a lot of the itemization in Wrath of the Lich King so that multiple classes could use the same gear. The combining of +spell damage and +spell healing into a single stat called +spell power seems to be the most widely discussed. It's probably because it has a lot of cloth casters in the game up in arms. The major concern seems to be that priests, warlocks, and mages will be competing on the same gear when running dungeons and raids. However, it should be offset by the drop rates being more friendly since all cloth casters can use the same gear.

Another concern was that healers need larger amounts of +spell healing compared to the amount of +spell damage that offensive casters require. Thus some healers think that if they are limited to having the same amount of +spell power as offensive casters they won't be able to heal effectively. I'm guessing that Blizzard is already on this problem though and will probably rework the coefficients on +spell power so that it works differently on healing and damage spells. The recent changes to spell down-ranking suggest this is the case since the technique favored healers. Blizzard probably found it hard to balance the universal +spell power with down-ranking and thus decided to switch to a mana cost percentage.

In my opinion, the new universal critical strike rating is much more interesting then the +spell damage and +spell healing combination. This itemization change goes a long way to merging the mail selection for shamans and hunters since +critical strike would apply to both melee and spell attacks. There's some of the same concerns about having to compete for the same items, but again it would improve drop rates. It also opens up some interesting possibilities for new classes. Cloth items that had stamina, spirit, and +critical strike could also theoretically be used for some type of new melee class. It seems obvious that that the itemization changes are all about opening items to as many classes as possible.

I've talked about how much I hate random loot tables before and the very class specific itemization in World of Warcraft has made it a problem. Blizzard can't simply make all dungeon drops bind-on-equipped or else they would flood the market. Instead they've been forced to come up with other alternatives like the token system. Tokens are a fine way to allow players to make steady progress to a reward, but some players want the traditional loot table. In that case the item stats changes makes a lot of sense on Blizzard's part. It allows players to stay with the loot distribution system they are more familiar with and it reduces the number of times a item drop and no one can use it. The only other option would be a complicated system that checks every one's class and talents before assigning loot.

Cons:
Competing with more classes for gear
Reworking the theorycraft behind optimal stats for each class
Less variation in what people are wearing

Pros:
More items on loot tables for each class
Less items rotting/sold for gp
Simplify the overall min/max process
Makes it easier to introduce new classes (pirate/ninja pls)