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Q u o t e:
Is it really that bad having a "best" profession?

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Yes, we think so. A key to games being fun is feeling like you have a choice. If you aren't making decisions then you aren't really playing a game -- you are watching something as a viewer not participating as a player. Game design has proven over many years that when you have choice A and choice B where choice A grants more power and choice B looks cooler or grants almost any other kind of benefit, a vast majority of players will choose A. In their minds there is no choice. It has to be A. Likewise if humans were the most powerful race and mages were the most powerful class then WoW would not be very diverse. We want tradeskills to be a choice. Having a best profession means that choice does not exist.

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Q u o t e:
You try to corner them on something like warlock vs rogue, or fire mage vs melee, or enh. shaman vs nearly anything, and they say 'oh there's no 1v1 balance' while offering absolutely no justification for why they would intentionally neglect the foundation stone of all pvp.

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I believe we have offered the justification before, but to reiterate it, we designed WoW to be a group-based game. You participate through much of the content, especially the end-game content, as a team. If we had developed a 1v1 game, we would have made some of the mechanics work very differently. In a 1v1 game for example, healing would have to be far weaker such that a single healer could not overcome a single damage-dealer. (Currently a 5-player dungeon or Arena team needs but one healer for the entire group.) Abilities, particularly the crowd-control, would have to be much less powerful because there would be nobody to help you out. It is likely that class abilities and stats would have to be a lot more homogenized because basically you are compressing all of the roles and strengths of the entire team into one player. That's not to say you don't come into 1v1 scenarios sometimes even when you're participating as a team. But we don't expect those to be as balanced as larger group interactions.

I'm not sure what the foundation stone of all pvp is to which you refer. Many competitive sports would not be nearly as interesting (nor likely as balanced) in a 1v1 setting. Consider (American) football. Would you put a defensive linesman against a receiver? Does that even make sense? It's designed to be a group sport. WoW is designed for the most part to be a group-based game.

Compared to a lot of MMOs you can experience a lot of WoW's content while solo, but it should be obvious that we don't offer 1 player Arena team or 1 player raids for a reason.

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Q u o t e:
I know you have to choose between variety and homogenization. There's no way to have both.

The problem is that you're aggressively moving towards homogenization with equalizing dps (this is the real culprit behind all the current balance problems, as I'm sure you're aware) and yet you're not homogenizing everything. (That would require giving everyone self-healing, and making many game mechanics baseline for everyone)

Which one do you want?

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I think that's a false dichotomy of extremes, like asking whether having a police state or anarchy is more preferable. We want tradeskills, races and class to be an interesting decision. If all the classes are the same, it's not interesting. If one tradeskill is too powerful, it's not a decision.