I Still Suck at Alts

Is it really possible to maintain my 'I suck @ alts' effete detachment when I am in the process of efficiently and enjoyably getting a third toon up and going?

The druid was an aberration eventually corrected when the tree got benched and the hunter returned to the exclusive focus of my excessive wow time. Funny thing is, once I got geared out, got pvp out of my system, and picked up some low-hanging achievements, I was sort of out of things to do.

So, I had this level 60 paladin sitting around from way back when I did RAF to get my druid leveled up. I also had some spare badges.

Now I have a cusp-of-69 paladin and am having a lot of fun facerolling retribution and did at least half of my outlands xp in the dungeon finder.

Initially, I had very realistic goals for this character, I was going to get to 80 and run as ret to a gearscore in the 4500's then find something else to do. I also was not going to spend any gold on the character other than the heirloom flight tome (because I am not quite that much of a masochist) and cheap gems and enchants, preferably from quest reward cash reserves. No auction house gear at all, don't need it, don't want it.

So far, so good. I might have bought a couple of cheap thing in the AH along the way, but I did it with quest reward dosh on the pally and with profits from the new toon's two gathering professions rolling well I am even breaking even on the flight training with more gold coming every night.

The dilemma, though, is role.

Do I just stay ret all the way to the end of my project, through leveling and gearing at 80?

Or, do I dual spec so that the paladin gives me an expanded utility in my stables of characters?

Can I switch a non-dps role at 80 and stay single-specced?

Do I really want to tank ever at all?

Not buying dual spec saves me gold and time. If I only have one roll, be it dps or otherwise means no grand sunk into dual spec and only one gear set to collect. That said, doing that as dps means longer queue times and not adding any new role utility to my stable given that I have a pure-dps character and a melee/healer already, anything other than a tank is just a timesink on my part.

And that badge farming would take a good bit of time. The hunter had the benefit of having been active through the Ulduar era and geared well enough to run heroics when I started gearing for current content. The new paladin would need to gear up to the task of running heroics. As a retadin, this is an almost non-issue, as I could run iLevel 200 heroics in quest gear, but if I did go for the faster queue times or role novelty of holy or prot, I would have a ramp to heroics. I did that with the druid, and did it before dungeon finder, and it wasn't fun. Being a failtree in heroics I jumped into too soon was not fun.

While going holy would mean faster queues and a role I am comfortable with, the expense (gold and time) in a redundant toon seems silly. If I am doing this for any reason other than just having fun, then I have to go prot. I don't have a tank (though I am just a respec and some gem swaps away from on on my druid, who has a full set of tanking trinkets and jewelry), but I went down that path with the druid and I hated tanking. It was too stressful and keeping aggro in the AoE mayhem era is an exercise in self-flagellation.

In the end, it is a case of rational argument vs. emotional
outlet. The paladin is a timesink and a for-fun project. The choice that most suits the goal of fun-until-cata is to single-spec and stay ret, but I feel compelled to do more. Maybe I should just stick to the plan, maybe I should learn to tank, maybe I should just do ret to the goal's completion and then do prot, maybe this is a long post about nothing.