You can buy any of the current weapons with gil too, and it doesn't take nearly as long to buy the clear as it does to even find the materials or trade things in for Relic or Mythic weapons. I made >20mil sell/splitting Delve boss clears and drops back before the skill+ patch and I wasn't even going with my LS regularly because I didn't care about gil/don't need anything.

By and large, FFXI is not a difficult game. It has exactly two ways to make things hard to obtain:
1) Time = Difficulty (RMEs, Plasm farming, etc.)
2) Random = Difficulty (NNI, D-ring, rare random augment systems, etc.)

If there's ever something that's truly difficult, players tend to whine until it's toned down to the point that they can handle it. To use a recent example of this, I'd say that 5-NM Delve boss clears on release, before we got good weapons, were difficult but possible. That was about the most difficult content that people accept in FFXI, but it was still possible to win almost 100% of the time (only depending on the stunner's lag). Even so, very few people got clears until they could just shout for people with boss drops and people still lose all the time even after the skill patch, which should really have brought the content difficulty down to the point that anyone could limp through it.


So what is your ideal event that rewards the ultimate weapon? Will you make it something like pre-Oatixurs Delve or first-patch NNI, where 90% of the game's population may be too unskilled to even complete it? Will you stop their ultimate-weapon ambitions simply because they're not top-10% players skill wise, even if they love the game and their chosen job?

No, I'd hope not. Ideally ultimate weapons would just signify long-term dedication to the job and use time to set the "difficulty." After that, it's just a matter of accepting that time=gil the same way that SE did.