Sometimes I forget that I've been playing WoW far longer than most people - the game's mainstream visibility was at its peak in the year or so after launch, so the fact that I joined after that has always made me feel like a "new" player, which, after four entire expansions, is a pretty silly way to feel.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that some newer players may not be aware that before Wrath of the Lich King, all raids were designed for a specific number of players. Vanilla's raid sizes were larger, with 40-man raids as the main event and 20-mans as the "smaller, intimate" ones. (Before my time, some dungeons would actually allow for up to 10 players. There was more granularity between raids and dungeons back then, though I don't think it was necessarily a good thing.)
While it caused some problems later in the expansion, due to the fact that almost all the other raids (save Zul'Aman, which was a kind of "interquel" raid, with lower quality loot than the contemporary top raid, which was then Black Temple/Mount Hyjal) were 25-mans, Karazhan served as the introductory raid for Burning Crusade.
I could have some of this wrong, so feel free to correct me, but I believe that work on Karazhan first began in Vanilla, to serve as either a dungeon or a raid, but they ultimately postponed it and brought it in at the launch of BC.
Karazhan had (and has - it's almost unchanged from its original state, save for new battle pet drops and a less impossible-to-solo Chess Event) a lot going for it. It is, as far as I know, the only raid to have an actual quest chain that runs through it, filling you in on the story of the place. Karazhan also has greatly varied environments (though the second half, when you get into the Guardian's Library, gets a little repetitive,) and a wonderful overall tone and flavor, aided by the spooky Karazhan theme. It even had the first "bonus boss," Nightbane, which required the completion of a quest chain that took you through the entire raid and even into some of the heroic dungeons.
But the thing that I find interesting about Karazhan is the way that it really felt scaled properly for a 10-man raid. The place was huge, and the climb up the tower certainly felt epic (despite the repetitiveness of the Guardian's Library section, it's hard to argue with how cool it was to look all the way down and see how far you had climbed from the Curator's Menagerie, which you should remember is itself very high above the ground floor.) Yet despite the size of the raid itself, each room felt reasonably human in scale. The lower half in particular, which feels much more like a nobleman's palatial manor house, feels like every room has a real function, and you could actually imagine someone living there.
There's certainly a place for 25-man raids. If you want to feel like an army really storming a heavily guarded fortress, having a large group feel pretty great. But there's another side to the epic coin that I think 10-mans, and particularly places like Karazhan, embody. The feeling of investigating a mystery, going into a dark and foreboding place that is almost certainly dangerous, but not in a way that is obvious.
Mogu'shan Vaults, for instance, I think feels more like a 10-man kind of raid, even though its huge spaces can easily accommodate 25. Heart of Fear, on the other hand, or Black Temple, on the other hand, are massive military assaults. Siege of Orgrimmar, I'm sure, will be huge.
But frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing more raids in the vein of Karazhan. Sure, Malchezaar kind of came out of nowhere, but with Blizzard's great steps forward in their ability to tell a story in-game, through scenarios, quest hubs, and cut-scenes, I think we could have more raids with an air of mystery that we unravel as we progress through it.
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