Anyone who has paid attention to the dev team responses has noticed a response bringing up their small development team as an excuse for how and why things are done in updates now a days. My response to this is a smaller subscription fee. It's only fair.
Why should players pay the same price for a subscription for a well staffed, high content delivery via updates if the staff is under manned and the content updates are lack luster? Everyone is well aware that FFXIV was not charging a subscription fee for their terrible release yet they were running with a larger staff than FFXI and were getting much better and more frequent updates (before someone argues that FFXI subscription fee's were paying for FFXIV development that's a moot point and is not a valid excuse). Not only that but there is much more (and detailed) communication from the FFXIV team regarding current and future plans unlike here in these forums where we don't hear anything for days and when we do it either provides vague, un-descriptive information or completely misses the point of the topic (and sometimes is the complete opposite). Not only is communication poor, but the updates are too few.
Veteran players are running out of things to do due to lack of content in these updates. The meat of the update usually comes from either Voidwatch (which requires a full alliance and has horrible drop rates), WoE (which dies out eventually and cant be done low man in most cases) and Merit Points. Any abilities gained through these updates are just renamed abilities from other jobs. I would mention Abyssea but most people are done with that and only really use it for Exp/Merits. Even with these options the additions are small and the only reason people continue to do them for as long as they do is because the drop rates are ridiculously low.
Maybe a compromise could be to lower subscription costs to veteran players who have played for X amount of time, but then again as quickly as things can be accomplished these days with Abyssea exp gain, it doesn't take long to get to the level of a veteran player.
Smaller subscription costs may even get a few of the players to stick around a bit longer or to come back to the game. Many cant justify spending the money when the urge to log in isnt there.
Any way you slice it the players are getting the short end of the stick. It would be a nice gesture from SE to reduce their cost of playing the game if they intend to continue to provide such mediocre service to their customers.