My personal opinion (And please hate on it) is that if people want to explore old content, they should be able to. They bought the damn expansions, but they can't explore because there's a minimum on present members. Most people can literally solo an Assault run, so what's the point in forcing them to ask people that they don't know (Or linkshell members who don't want to go in the first place until the person wanting to go has to beg and beg.).

I can pretty much counter anything anyone has to say about my attitude towards SoA, because personally I'm too casual of a player to waste my time with repetitive plasm grinds and reives (SP), and would rather explore everything FFXI has to offer instead of one expansion that from what I've seen is nothing more than a Mongolian Clusterf--k.