You know, frank up there nailed it, but I'm not here to laugh at the 'I want sword of supershiny and nobody else can have it' people.

Here's the problem: the game has a severe myopia when it comes to reward. You want 18+ endgame? Fine! There's the Legion -- it's tailor-made for all the HNM-fighting, 18-man goodness you can get.
Your rewards are: a sidegrade. A haste+4%, str+8 and assorted stats sidegrade.

That, quite frankly, should upset the hard-mode crowd more than me. It makes me go 'meh' since I'm not in the market for end-game of that sort, but for you hard-mode people out there, it's even more meh. That's not an endgame reward, that's a joke. That's the type of shit that you should be able to get through a quest, or somesuch.

What if Legion dropped rings that gave stat+50? body pieces that were haste+25%, etc? If you are going to have this be endgame, then have it be endgame with oomph. Have it be gear that, when I get it, I can put on and see a difference.

However, you also need to have actual content for the rest of the crowd -- and that's exactly the problem. There is no content other than endgame content. There is nothing except NM-killing and loot-chasing.

Imagine starting out in this game now -- and imagine doing it coming from other MMOs. Quests are confusing, and give no rewards. The game doesn't explain to you how to participate in the variety of content -- no explanations for BCNM, VNM, ANNM, ENM, and all other dead content taking up space. No PvP, no crafting/gathering worth doing, no non-battle content such as pankration/chocobo raising/MMM.

All of this stuff is in the game, but shitty. It gives no rewards, takes too long to do, and is too hard to get into. Why can't all of this stuff be meaningful?

The game needs a serious revamp, for both the end-game and the actual playing of the game. It needs to be fun to play. That does require breaking the game. Why? because the elitist crowd who truly cared about the nerfing of the heroics are a tiny percentage of gamers. Most people want to have fun when they are playing a game, not have the item x. that nobody has. If that wasn't true, then WoW would've tanked the moment their first expansion made the former expansion obsolete.