Nothing forces you to do the newest (or even the older) raids in FFXIV, though.
You can play for a bit to see the new dungeons, etc then take a break. This is how the game was designed.
And using the same equipment for 5 years is awful boring, there's no sense in progression. You get a new piece of gear and you maybe, might do 1% more performance. Wow. That doesn't really make me feel like I accomplished anything.
With FFXIV, if I clear the latest dungeons and buy a piece of the latest tomestone gear, the progression is real. I can FEEL the difference in my character's performance without needing to bust out a calculator and a parse and go kill 1,000 mobs to get a large enough sample size to see that 1% performance increase. I see the difference right there and then.
I don't want to use the same equipment for 5+ years. I don't really understand people who do (no offense meant). In FFXIV, I'll keep around old equipment occasionally for changing jobs or for glamours but otherwise... I don't care if it's replaced two months, or even two weeks later. That's called progress. I like progress. I like feeling like I achieved something, I enjoy feeling growth in my character.
I like the resets that come with expansions, gives me a time to, indeed, catch up, and gives other players time to catch up, and it gives fresh newbies a chance to get right into the scene with other players, keeps things shaken up. It gets boring if the same group of people are always in current content and everybody else is still climbing the ladder underneath them. Nobody new to play with, it's the same people you see doing the same stuff over and over again. If it weren't for the fact development on this game ceased, that's what you'd have as there's hardly ever any catchup here outside of the very campaigns you speak so much against. Do you like playing with the same group of people and never seeing anybody new? I think that would get boring after awhile.
As for FFXIV, I don't need to be in the newest Savage or Ex Primals to enjoy the game. 90% of the rest of the game's content is open to me, the person who only goes as far as Normal Raids and Expert Roulettes, and I can indeed pick and choose my grind. Do I feel like doing Expert? No? Ok, I can let it go and do it another day and still keep within 30 item-level of the best gear which is plenty good enough for me outside of Savage Raids. Do I feel like crafting my daily stuff today? No? No sweat, I can slide it to the side and pick up on that another day; they will let me catch up later.
I can play the game when I want, as much as I want, and have fun either way. I don't need to feel like I'm falling behind, and even if you did, you know what? I blew through Heavensward in like 3 months going from lv50->60+Expert Roulettes. Now obviously I would have liked to have seen some of that content when it was relevant, but that's going to happen in any MMO. I'm just glad the chance to catch-up before Stormblood was there. If that were FFXI, there would have been monstrous road-blocks that required groups and I would have never seen the story fights until years later when they became solo-able like Aht Urhgan. You know, I JUST saw the Aht Urhgan missions about a month ago for the very first time, despite me being an active player since late Zilart (I did take two hiatuses, but that was well after WotG).
Why didn't I see them when AU was current? Well because it was "need group for this, need group for that, VT/IT everywhere, can't do anything solo, blah blah". No catchups, nothing. Get Group or Go Home hardline mentality that was just a huge roadblock in front of you. I didn't have a linkshell at the time (I was in one that did Promathia missions, got lucky enough to get into a static, but they broke up right after we finished), so I was out of luck. Didn't really have anything to offer a linkshell at the time (I wasn't able to get into endgame, and because I had nothing to offer, nobody wanted me, the shells at the time were already rather saturated with newbie players).
What I'm trying to get at here, is you rail on FF14 for having "no content", but to be honest, FF14 allows me to play 90% of its game while it's current content, while FFXI doesn't. We still have "get linkshell or go home" stuff, and it is sadly, most of what there is to do in FFXI once you finish all of the outdated/obsolete/old stuff. I'm running out of things to do in FFXI, and all I got left is WotG, Adoulin, and San d'Oria missions. Once I get those done, I'm having a hard time coming up with anything else to do, except maybe Abyssea. And I can't see myself being interested in that for long, because the whole thing just looks like a confusing mess of mobs to pop that don't always drop the items to pop the next one. Dunno who thought THAT was a good idea. Ah well.
Either way, when that stuff runs out, what is there to even DO in FFXI anymore when everything requires a group, but nobody is recruiting? And no, "Move to Asura" is not the answer. It shouldn't be the answer. Ever.