Death of the 25m raid, update

I realize that we are months away from Cata and most stuff isn't set in paper much less in stone, but the info coming out about the direction Blizzard is leaning for raid structure is just getting worse for the 25 man raid environment.

here are the latest quotes:
Amount of gear in 10/25-Man Raids
The amount of gear in the 25 person raids will be roughly equivalent on per-person basis to the 10 person raids. One thing to keep in mind it that we don't plan to allow players to upshift from 10s to 25s, only downshift from 25s to 10s on a given week.

(roughly equivalent on a per person basis. This statement just negates any real incentive to organize 1 25 man group over one or two 10 man groups with the most elite in your guild)

The statements beforehand said that 25person would have more gear per person than 10s, so I wonder if "roughly equivalent" indicates a change in plans, or just not wanting to commit yet to either "exactly the same" or "more".
The number 6 per boss was being mentioned I believe, so slightly more I guess, but anything can change in testing so I wouldn't say that it is set in stone. But we all know you guys won't call us out if anything changes during a beta, right?

So basically there will be no real incentive (gear-wise at least) to run 25 man raids.
There are rewards like badges/gold for the additional coordination involved, but we are trying to avoid having gear be the reason that one style is better than the other.

(what does "badges/gold" mean exactly? I get that you would get more gold in 25s but does badges mean tier badges? Are they implying we will get more for 25s or not? We know that the actual frost/triumph/hero badge system is going away in favor of a point system. By saying they are trying to avoid having gear be the deciding factor it smells like a no to more loot per person in 25s.)

The main reason most competitive guilds run 25s now is because of 2 things: better gear and EPEEN factor of killing the hardest stuff.

The new system takes away having to go to 25s to kill the hardest stuff and get the best gear. The only incentive (as of last week) to do a 25 man raid was the prospect of gearing up faster by 50% per person. If that goes away the only reason you would go to a 25 over a 10 is that you had 25 reliable people who were also amazing at their job.

They just took away all of the incentive while leaving all of the headaches of putting together the bigger raid.

With Blizzard making it possible to downshift your raid from 1x 25 to 3x 10s, and the fact that you can mix and match your 10s if need be, it sounds like Blizzard wants the focus to be on a 10 man raid environment.