And also the limited amount of content. I think the majority of people are already bored of spamming Reives (they stopped doing them) or Assignments. Wildkeepers Reive never got much love, Skirmish was broken. Basically all people do are Plasm farming and Delve Megabosses, and the frequency of Plasm Farming runs are greatly reduced compared to the past, at least on my server.
Maybe it has something to do with how slow you farm Plasm on normal menapo runs compared to how much you can get on boss runs.

This is all a consequence, a result of their choice to go the "item level" way. Clearly they had already planned it when they released the expansion.
They should have gone for option one. This way we would have had awesome alternatives to RME weapons, new gear, new content but AT THE SAME TIME we would still have had the option of doing old content, which would still have been relevant, to some extent.

There was no need at all to increase the level cap, be it through level or through the crappy solution of the item level.

And it's sad to acknowledge this because it's pretty clear that despite all the feedback we could possibly give in the most constructive and polite way, it's way too late. Too much of the expansion has been planned around the core concept of "Item Level" and they can't turn back now, it's way too late for that.
And it's sad, so sad, pure sadness.

No matter how much they will work to "fix" things now or to look for a better compromise, they won't be able to change that initial choice which was absolutely wrong and completely incoherent with what FFXI has been for the past 11 years.
After doing similar mistakes with Abyssea and after them greatly criticizing it for one reason or another, you'd be leaning to think they learned their lesson.
This change is happening close to the launch of FFXIV ARR, just like the other one (level cap increase, Abyssea etc) happened around the launch of FFXIV 1.0.
Now is this a coincidence and I'm a bad, paranoid person for thinking about it, or maybe there's more than meets the eye?

I feel so sad atm, really, the knowledge that they couldn't possibly fix this even if they wanted to is really hard on me.