Breakfast Topic: Should raids stand alone?

I was talking on the Blizzard Watch podcast about how the raids flowed into each other in The Burning Crusade, and that got me thinking about Vanilla raids. See, there was a lot less concern about having raids that fit into each other as part of an interlocking storyline back then — Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair both kind of locked into Blackwing Lair to some degree (especially Ony, who you killed to make cloaks for your raid to wear to BWL) but none of those raids had anything to do with Zul’Gurub or either of the Ahn’Qiraj raids, and the connection between those and Naxxramas was even more tenuous. And it worked fine, for the most part — each new raid was a new threat to be dealt with, a new evil to overcome in the defense of your faction and your world.

Each expansion has kind of lost that — BC had some unconnected raids like Karazhan (tangentially related to the Burning Legion) and Zul’Aman (absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the expansion story) but most raids led into each other in some fashion. You went to TK and SSC to stop Illidan’s forces and also prevent Kael’thas from aiding the Burning Legion, who ultimately were confronted finally in the Sunwell. Wrath of the Lich King had a few stories (Malygos’ war on magic use, Yogg-Saron’s escape from Ulduar) running concurrent with that of the Lich King himself. Cataclysm was less likely to produce side stories of that nature and both Mists and Warlords seem completely focused on all raids being part of an overall storyline.

Maybe we don’t need that, though. Maybe for the next expansion we could go back to the older way where each patch that came out essentially introduced a new storyline, with a new raid and a new enemy. What do you think — should we stick with end bosses and overarching plotlines or can each raid stand alone for once?