Originally Posted by alvinrod

With all of the data the Blizzard has at its fingertips it's possible that they actually see fire and frost DPS as relatively close. Consider that they could have access to the amount of DPS done by every character for every encounter since the expansion was released. Also consider that there are a lot of really bad players who will manage to do substandard DPS even with a good spec. Fire spec isn't exactly hard to play, but there are enough nuances that you can wind up with suboptimal DPS with sloppy play. Average out the DPS over thousands of mages and encounters and it's possible that Blizzard sees the two as being within some margin of error.

Since EJ theory crafting always works under the assumption that the player will be good and play the class as perfectly as possible, we only bother to look at the theoretical DPS that the class can output. In this case there's a noticeable disparity between fire and frost. It's possible that the developers are now aware of this difference and have decided the two specs are not as equal as they had believed them to be based upon any data they might have. It's also conceivable that of the 3.1 changes announced so far they feel as though fire is pulling farther ahead based on the addition of the living bomb glyph and the scalability of deep fire.

It's highly speculative on my part, but based on a large number of blue posts on the Blizzard forums, the developers claim that they have access to the kind of information on which I'm basing my assumption. I think that most people here would agree that frost is comparably easier to play than fire or at least more straightforward, which means that the average mage can get more out of it than they would be able to with another, more complicated spec. It's possible that in the hands of the unskilled masses, the two specs produce DPS numbers which are not significantly different statistically based on the data Blizzard has amassed.