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I think the difficulty can continue to increase, because I believe new raiders can get "up to speed" so much faster now than if we compare to the MC days.
1. Information about the core mechanics. Granted these are extremely lacking from within the actual game, but there is a wealth of information on this site, wowwiki, even in wowhead comments. When the game was released, plenty of people had absolutely no idea about any of these concepts and learning about them was very difficult. I remember running ZF while leveling my first character shortly after release and telling my friend who was tanking "Hey, I was reading somewhere that Sunder Armor works really well for keeping mobs on you".
2. Useful addons and mods. Think back to MC. Damage-meters didn't exist. No one really knew how much DPS they were doing. Big numbers over mobs head? Good job! Threat-meters didn't exist. It took a lot more "experience" to know how hard you could push without pulling aggro. Now you just tell someone, this measures your threat; don't pass the tank. Think of all the changes to the base UI: Raid Markings, Target-of-target, Enemy Castbars. There is so much more information available now than what was previously "hidden".
3. Videos and Boss Strategies. They are everywhere. Other than simply teaching you how to beat a boss, reading boss strategies is an excellent way to learn basic raid strategy "by example" to understand the importance of positioning, offtanking, focus fire, and others. I remember the first time I read an account of Onyxia Phase 1 atempts and strategy (before anyone had successfully killed Onyxia) and was literally fascinated by the "strategy" in what we would now consider a pretty simple tank-n-spank phase. The CQ guide to Molten Core was huge. I really wonder what portion of "first-mmo" WoW players (non EQ vets) that eventually killed MC bosses relied on the CQ guide. I would guess its enormous.
4. Better 5-man training grounds. There were a number of unique encounters in the original 5-mans, but tons and tons of bosses had abilities that could simply be ignored and zerged, even for poor players. The expansion 5-mans do a much, much better job of encouraging players to pay attention to boss abilities and counter them. Simply ignoring boss abilities in expansion 5-mans will often result in a wipe.
5. Existence of Veterans. Every guild now has got to have some guy that did MC or BWL, or knows about EJ or Bosskillers or wowhead or something, and can point smart people in the right direction.
Smart people can become good raiders pretty quickly with available information and a desire to learn. This is a far cry from the release of the game. Raid content can continue to scale up in complexity.
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