I think I'm finished; a new player's final thoughts

[AppropriateName5786]

And a few mins on wiki(FFXI has many sites that are free and well maintained and they pop up with the first 5 google results) would tell you right away and the only people doing it are people finishing mystics and by and large is dead content with little to no reason for new players to touch. Wiki and the rest of the info is out there and it was SE intentions at the start of of the game to push sites like wiki instead of having it explained in game or for players to ask each other and share the information between our selves. Though SE biggest mistake was to open these forums with out a suggestion area and a general help area and enforced it.

Well-maintained wikis? I am speechless. And googling a wiki and knowing what to look for/where to find it is very different. Getting a new player to google everything they don't understand about ffxi is akin to asking someone who doesn't know Italian to translate a paragraph from English to Italian using google translate. The result is mediocre at best, and an incomprehensible mess at worst.

As an experiment, I went to bluegartr wiki and typed "ZNM" in the search box. The top 5 results I got were Gyroscopic Gear, Gyroscopic Gear, Proto-Ultima, Donggu, FFXI Version Update History. How useful!

And the rest of your paragraph is nonsensical. FFXI having no official windowed mode and being on PlayStation 2 = SE pushing sites like wiki? Forcing players to break ToS and data mine everything because no one knows what does what = having players share information? Furthermore, from which crevice did you pull out "SE's intentions?"

by and large is dead content with little to no reason for new players to touch

You unwittingly argued for the OP. You think ZNMs are dead, the OP implies that CoP/RoZ/WotG/ToAU are dead by not wanting to do them. Neither can be proven wrong. Whether or not content is dead is subjective, but content road blocks that screw new players is an objective reality in this game.

edit: because I may have misrepresented OP's views regarding expansions