Casual raiding for more serious raiders

What you're describing is not different from the plan for our current raid night.

Thursday has no ilevel requirement because if it had one, we would never have enough people eligible to attend. If we had people of the appropriate roles and with sufficient ilevel to meet your criteria, they would already be given priority over less prepared characters on thursday. Unless they whine or show up late, anyway.

Thursday is already as "serious" as our guild is able to be.

[edit: About 18 of our 85's who show activity this week already meet your ilevel requirement. I can't find many who don't. I can only assume that our raids are already comprised of people over 346 and if they are not, people in queue should be swapped in who are. If nobody in queue is better geared for that role, then simply requiring that they be so will not make it so.

I understand that it's frustrating if you naturally progress much, much faster than the bell curve and are left waiting around bored while other people gear up. Keep in mind that we are a Brony guild first and a raiding guild second. Other guilds simply evict people who do not gear fast enough, and they are right to do so. As a fan guild we do not have this luxury, and so we must accommodate all play styles. If you're a pony, you're in.

The Pony Way to achieving what you want would be to spend some time sheparding our current 85's into shape by making suggestions on gear to obtain, offering ideas for optimizing their token farming time, and motivating them to gear up instead of waste time. Or run a prize contest like I am already doing!

Creating a new raid night with an ilevel requirement won't create more ponies that meet that requirement. Mentoring people who do not meet that requirement will.