I hardly ever write in this forum, because of the fact that what we write mostly seems to matter squat to SE 99% of the time, which is indicated by responses not even touching the threads actual topic or the lack of responses to start with.
I however feel that I should also voice my discontent about this new Seekers expansion. In my opinion it is as much of a fail as FFXIV 1.0 if not even worse.
The marketing was horrid, inlcuding advertisement (did anyone other than actual FFXI players knew about this expansion?) and availability (You couldn't even get the damn thing until a day or two before release in Europe) as well as price/content mess up (30€ really??? For a lousy amount of new copy/paste areas, new monster models countable on one hand and the same music for the entire ulbukan continent). I know we haven't gotten all that is supposed to be released with the expansion but what we actually got wasn't even worth a dime in the beginning and all at the cost of nothing else being ever done. The new interface, which we might finally get soon was supposed to be here way sooner, things like the new avatars promised 2.5 years ago have gone so low in priority you got to ask yourself if they ever get implemented within this century.
I believe FFXI had the chance to win old players back and even gain new players with this expansion if it simply would have been handled correctly. Yet instead we got a drop in players by at least 1/2 within a mere set of weeks after the initial "oh new expansion lets check it out hights". The problem: I haven't even started talking about how bad the actual content is we got so far but, it did not only try to change how the game has worked for the past decade, which naturally will upset players content with the style of the game so far, no it also invalidated any content before itself. I ask myself: why did they waste their time and bothered to make Nyzul 2, Salvage 2, Einherjar 2 and Limbus 2? For what reason did they overhaul previous engame events, just to have them being 100% worthless a few months later because the gear they provide is crap compared to the unmotivated level 113 crap we have now.
Why was it necessary to bring out skirmish as event with superior loot but no accessability just to bring out something else a month later making skirmish useless already and why are we still stuck with this event? At least the latter is easy to answer: there is no other content in this expansion and this expansion killed any other content but itself.
As a result people don't do other things for gear anymore, cause there is no other gear that still counts and people being able to finish fracture also don't do fracture anymore because they have beaten it enough times so they don't need anything from it anymore simply because it only offers a very few rewards to start with (why does everyone nowadays look the same I wonder...).
I understand that there needs to be incentive for players to do the new content so obviously the gear needs to have perks the older gear didn't have. However, was it necessary to drastically wipe up the floor with everything else? Just take the Phorcy's Korazin, add a mere 5str to it and keep all other values the same and people would go for it, cause it would have been the best item for the slot. Just look at the stupidness of the duplus grip. 1% more DA just ONE percent and on the one hand people went crazy about it while on the other it still didn't make the pole grip a crap item.
In my opinion it cannot be that say a Samurai that has played the job for over 5 years, put effort into gearing the job and pulled awesome feats with it but has no Tsurumaru, can be beaten by a person who leeched Samurai from 1-99 got lucky on a Tsurumaru drop, got otronif for his MNK and now tries playing sam for the first time and yes, the difference between Tsurumaru and the R/E/Ms is big enough to warrant the "newb SAM" to be better. If the gear was only slightly better, this wouldln't be possible and it would still have an appeal to it (and no for anyone who comes and says "well go get Tsurumaru then", I have that stupid weapon and I am disgusted by it)
I know this is a way too long post and maybe also missing a red line going through all of it but at least it has an answer to the OPs question. Granted it is my personal answer for the question, but I am sure that while some might disagree, many will actually agree with me. There is more that I could rant about but let's give it a rest here^^
Sincerely, Leylia