Why I like dailies

I haven't had much time to play WoW lately due to work-related stress (which also explains the slight drop-off in posts here), but I noticed that the one thing that I do without fail if I have any time to log on at all, is do a couple of daily quests.

To be honest I don't understand why they have such a bad reputation. I mean, occasionally I see another blogger mention that they actually like doing dailies, but even then there is usually some acknowledgement that this is weird and out of the ordinary. In comments to blog posts everywhere I mostly see people state that they hate dailies. From personal experience with guildies I get the impression that a lot of people do them, but only when they are in desperate need of money, as a sort of last resort. At the same time goblins look down on dailies as a sub-optimal method of money-making, because they only reward you with so much gold per hour.

Maybe the difference for me is that I don't look at dailies primarily as a way of making money, but rather as an incentive to guide my play into a certain direction. I mean, I like running instances. Which one should I do today? Hm, Gundrak is the daily heroic, which means that I get an extra reward for doing it and that it will be easier to find a group for it - let's do it!

Or to give another example, I also like fishing, but only in small chunks at a time and when I know that I have a good chance of fishing up something useful. So I always talk to Marcia Chase in Dalaran to see what's the fishing daily for any given day, but only when it's Dangerously Delicious do I actually go out and do it, because then it's a great opportunity to level my alts' fishing skill, get fish feast materials for the guild bank and get paid for it at the same time. How awesome is that?

Basically I look at dailies as a way of providing additional rewards for things that I wanted to do anyway. Since I want to do those things anyway, there's no reason not to do them every time I log in, and so I just "happen" to earn more money than I actually need as a side effect, never finding myself forced into a position to do things that I don't want to do just to earn gold.

I really don't understand why there aren't more people that play this way. In this day and age there's a daily for pretty much anything: killing mobs, gathering stuff, PvP, running instances, and in the next patch there'll be a weekly raid quest too. Hell, every couple of days an NPC will offer you a reward for what's basically just running around Dalaran, which you're probably doing anyway! So really, there's no reason not to get paid for the things you enjoy doing as it is - unless you really enjoy neither PvE nor PvP, but what are you playing WoW for then anyway?