simply artificially extends the loot grind.

Which is the very point of it. When they introduced it, they were fighting a system where guild that raid 3 days a week, maybe 2 of those days you ended up clearing farm bosses where you had no possible upgrades for and only had possible upgrades on night 3. It was a way to incentivize farm bosses.

If my BiS weapon drops off the 1st boss in a raid (which actually happened in ToT), that means I get to spend the next several months using the exact same weapon and no hope of ever upgrading it. The Sockets/WF at least gave me a reason to come back and kill that same boss, hoping for a bigger upgrade.

Hell, there literally are blue posts stating that WF/Socketed items are not guaranteed and it's entirely likely that raiders might end up going through the whole tier without every getting the perfect item -- and that's fine.

I don't know when people started thinking that they are entitled to have every single piece with a WF + Socket, but that was never the intent.

With WF/Socket, however, that's not the case. You still have to get the boss down, you still have to hope the piece that you wanted drops, but now you have to also deal with whether that piece is the one you want to go for or if you are going to wait for the next time in hopes it is WF/Socketted.

That's really not that big of a problem as you make it sound. In your situation, for example, I'd happily take the upgrade the 1st time in dropped regardless of sockets / WF simply because it would be a upgrade nonetheless, and then spend the next several weeks/months hoping to see sockets / WF to drop that I could then upgrade my piece too. Anybody who sat on inferior gear in hopes of a socket / WF someday dropping would be swiftly removed from any guild I've ever experienced.