The examples used so far are comparing a new recruit in blues to someone in the guild is well-geared. I'm interested in hearing opinions about the following example:

My old guild broke up while working on Firemaw and myself and a few others joined another guild the week they killed Vaelastrasz for the first time. Gear-wise, I was at the same level (or better in some cases) than the priests in the new guild. The priests in my guild, myself included, have an incredibly high attendance, so the point difference between all of us has stayed basically constant since when I first joined (Transcendence drops were rare for them so I started off about 400-500 points behind the other four priests with set pieces priced at ~150 points each).

Now, I've put basically the same effort as any other priest in the guild into both BWL (minus the first couple weeks) and AQ, yet because of points earned in MC and Onyxia, I was consistently about 3rd to 4th on the list for any drop. As a new recruit, is that fair? Sure it is. Those guys got the guild to that point, and even though I put in my blood, sweat and tears banging my head against the same content with a different guild (as opposed to getting a free ride with the new one) this isn't really transferable.

However, is it fair to always be 3-4 drops behind the other priests just because I wasn't there for MC or Onyxia? I personally lean towards no myself as the more time that passes, the more trivial those two instances and the effort put forth therein becomes.

Because of the relatively large influx of well-geared recruits to my new guild, the officers ended up deciding that each instance should have its own point system (we started with AQ and will do so again with Naxx) to reward people with the items they helped earn in the first place.

Now with an upgrade system, I can see why having separate point systems would be unnecessary, but how would that situation be handled under EJ's point rules?

We used an upgrade based, zero-sum system with one point total for all instances for some time. We somewhat recently moved to an instance separated system (which is naturally non-upgrade, with the exception of tier 2 hats and pants which drop from bosses in our 'MC' pool).

This was a better decision for us than it would be for most raiding guilds because of the way we're structured. We're a large, friendly (tragically non-elite) guild with a ton of people who raid 'infrequently' by most raiding guilds' standards, so we have a huge turnover in raiders from week to week - it may be counter-intuitive, but recent attendance will actually make you lower priority except when we're just about on the brink of downing the next significant boss or moving a 2-night clear down to one. Point being, there is always another group of newer raiders to pull through MC - the fruits of which would be about 5x the DKP as a BWL partial clear through the drakes, which was about where we were at the time, with every set item being bought at lower prices. In order to be competitive for the latest loot, raiders were essentially required to run MC every week even though they needed no items - which is a 'feature' if you're hurting for experienced/geared ringers to pull you through, but with the numbers we have it was not only unnecessary, it was harmful in that we were potentially waitlisting people who needed that gear for progression. Additionally, since our raid groups are by design much more inclusive, if a small upgrade is a lower priority than a large one, then consistent raiders will find themselves stuck in all tier 1 while letting newer raiders take the tier 2, essentially breaking the DKP system as it's intended.

I was among those who felt that this was an issue that could be solved by more intelligently picking raid groups each week and reevaluated upgrade prices, but in the end just splitting the pools stopped incentivizing gaming the system. As a result we only do one MC run a week now instead of two, but it saved our core raiding community some burnout and refocused them on new content.

True but we don't have a full discount system, we use a half discount. Ie. If you upgrade from T1 to T2 you will gain a rebate of half the DKP cost of the T1 piece.

Because in order to raid successfully on a frequent basis, you need more people on your roster than 40. This allows for people to miss a night or 2 and for the guild to continue to pogress and raid at a constant schedule. If 43 people show up to a raid, 3 aren't going to get to go. Why should those 3 not get DKP when they showed up on time, and it was just arbitrary decision or luck of the draw that prevented from actually getting to go on the raid. You are punishing people for an in-game mechanic that none of us can control. Which would be stupid.