Abyssea made ffxi endgame heavy. Pay or have a friend cleave in abyssea until your 99, that's where this game starts now. There's no going back from it. If your server truly is that desolate than either wait for a merger or transfer servers, nothing else to really do about it.

I've said it before, the linear ilvl climb is ruining the entire model this game has created over the past decade. If this isn't abandoned by the next expansion, there won't be much of a game left. This is not WoW or a WoW clone. It is its own entity and cannot have a radically different model shoved on top of it without angering and separating the community.