It was a issue caused by SE poor planning of going back to alliance with a harsh time restriction at a point in the game we had already received two server merges. Say what you will but abyssea was as close to perfect reward effort with just the right amount of RNG we should have gotten more of that but SE failed and keeps failing to understand their own player base. Sure you could duel box mnk, whms for blue drops but that could had been fixed. Content should had been designed around the single party model. Abyssea wasn't perfect and there was job exclusion but you could still gain rewards and with a few tweaks it could have been remedied. Instead we got VW and then SoA dropping the ball with the event they billed as the option for low man.
No means am I defending SoA but it is stretch that ilvl is the cause or even the pace of rewards. The other factors did far more damage then ilvl could ever have. I have 10 friends leave cause they couldn't get into delve plasma runs or KI mob runs, both are a directly caused by SEs failings to understand the player base and should had seen it coming. Really they only had how long to see it happen with VW to know it would turn out just like that.
Though in the end the player base got exactly what they asked for. All the threads complaining about how much gear we had to carry around. We got Stats and lots of them on everything, grinding to rewards, faster rewards, less dependency on the RNG etc. to bad the way they did it was a fail.