The lack of enforced daily activities and prescribed progression path is an intentional design. There is no checklist of do X dungeon, Y raid, and Z dailies here; you can do what you want, when you want. Once you've reached the point where you have access to raids and such, the choice to do them or not is yours. This includes the order in which you do them. To many former WoW raiders the free-form nature and general "zero to 60 in 1.0 seconds" ramp in difficulty is an adjustment.
A good portion of the community will disagree with the opinion of Only Casual or Only Hardcore, with no in-between. It's true that the level of difficulty of XIV's dungeons, raids, trials, etc is typically lower than in WoW. For people who are used to the greater challenges of Mythic+, etc, XIV's PVE content can seem extremely easy up to the point where it gets really difficult. It's a matter of acclimatization; WoW players have acclimated to a much higher level of challenge in certain content and view content that pushes difficulty continually, again Mythic+, as the norm, which isn't something XIV provides. It's understandable that those people would be considered Hardcore here in XIV even if they were considered average in WoW due to that difficulty creep.
To get yourself oriented, I'd start from the regular difficulty 8 and 24 man raids and Extreme Trials while getting geared up. Finding a learning group in Party Finder or better yet, a static willing to help you gear up and get your feet under you would be good.
