The Red-Protodrake is for sale for 1800 gold with top faction from the Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight if I recall, nothing special about that. If you mean the VIOLET Protodrake, that one comes from getting every world event achievement for an entire year (ie being present for every holiday and completing all activities in the event). That's a bit tricky since it takes persistant, and some of the things like the Noble Garden egg-camping bit take a lot of time and dedication.
Otherwise I'm somewhere between hardcore and casual, though I've fit BOTH those roles in the past, as well as being a RPer for a while when I first joined my server (which is an RP server).
I have no real problem with achievements, but I feel that by making the game more casual friendly (when it was already THE casual friendly MMORPG) was a mistake. As things stand there is already a metric ton of casual content, the majority of the content has ALWAYS been for casual players. While hardcore players might only represent 10% of the population, I do feel that there should be something there for people who put in that kind of effort except for a slight notation on their sheet. I pretty much feel also that by catering to too casual a mentality it also discourages people from ever wanting to make the transition from casual to normal, or even hardcore.
To some extent I think the current mentality removes the specialness of a lot of the content. I mean there is nothing incredible about a super-dragon if pretty much anyone in the game can see, or defeat it. It's just not really all that super anymore. Knowing it's out there however is one of the things that motivates people to get that good.
Things being what they are, if I went back to casual play I'd probably think much the same way. Heck, to be honest if it wasn't for things like "old skhool" Onyxia and the like I never would have gotten the motivation to go as far as I did with attunements and such. I spent bloody weeks doing attunement runs for Ony, MC, and BWL to make sure we had enough people to fill 40 man raid groups just so we could get in the door.
Truthfully I think 10% of the content being something you have to work for is pretty "fair". It's not like it's truely off limits, it's simply there for people who want to play at that level.
Besides which as I've pointed out before, a lot of casual players who cry about not having uber-loot and such miss the entire point to an extent. In World Of Warcraft you can run around solo and hit level 80 without ever having to deal with another person to do a group quest or dungeon if you want to. You will be able to kill just about anything that is non-elite in the game with minimal effort just with green, single player loot rewards. If that's how your playing why the holy heck do you need ungodly epic gear? Nothing you fight requires stuff like that. In general a raider pretty much gets their "phat lewt" specifically so they can progress to kill a tougher tier of monsters that comes next (either out there or under development). It's an endless grind since there is always a bigger monster and a shinier tier of Lewt, coming up, but the thrill is to perform those precisian actions (breaking a fight, and then getting faster and faster, doing hard modes, etc...), the loot simply being a way of keeping the progression in order.
I find the idea of some guy crying about a lack of raid epix so they can whack world spawn murloc camps or whatever is kind of absurd. If your not interesting in hanging out with 10-25 (or previously 40) other dedicated people to kill "Internet Dragons" or even make fun of the idea, then really I feel you have no right to the loot... and by the same token you have the other 90% of the content to do whatever you want with through as many characters as you make.