Dang it Mastgrr!

You beat me to it! Although, you did abridge some of his comments. Here they are in full, with respect to Retribution.

It took reposting the threads to version 6.0, but Blizzard has finally weighed in on the debate.

A poster in the thread asks:

Kalgan, what exactly is the purpose of the retribution tree? What is the advantage of choosing ret over holy or protection?

Kalgan responds:

It's an effective solo'ing/questing/"grinding" tree. It's also an effective tree for damage in pvp, although most of our pvp is group oriented and your groupmates will generally prefer that you play a support role since their classes can often supply the needed dps but aren't able to supply the support a paladin is capable of.

It's also quite possible to get groups for 5-person instances as a ret pally, provided you aren't the type that will rule out healing in an emergency or for certain encounters provided it would help more at that moment.

An exasperated Ret Paladin comments:

What answers do you need? The spec is worthless. Raid leaders won't take us, Kalgan has admitted it's useless in group PVP, and anyone with a spec of knowledge knows you need to outgear anyone to kill them. It's dead. Respec, reroll or quit.

With Kalgan responding:

Actually, ret pallies can do some surprisingly strong raid dps if they're in a good melee group dps composition. Encouraging raid leaders to do this is the reason for this change:

- "Sanctity Aura" now increases all damage caused by affected targets by 1/2% and no longer increases healing done to affected targets.

The response from the more asinine neopaladins* on the Paladin forums is best summed up with this Q&D Google image search + Photoshop representation:

*Neopaladin: WoW players who rolled a Paladin long after original launch and in full knowledge of their primary healer/support role and endgame caster playstyle. Usually antagonistic towards the few remaining original Paladin rollers who are unhappy with the direction the class has taken. Most recently bolstered by the influx of Horde healing classes rerolling a class formerly unavailable to their faction.