that a4s weapon will be trash too, come 3.2, what's your point? Welcome to vertical progression
Bear in mind, 3.15 is a mini-patch between major patches. Everything in it was likely already made during 3.1 and was just waiting to be released. Patch 3.1 did have entirely new gameplay (Diadem, Verminion), but the problem is a lot of people simply don't like it. The devs chose to make all the new content available outside of the relic quest. There are two sides to this. One, people can enjoy the group content without grinding through a check-list of mobs and quest steps to unlock it. This is a bonus to some people. The other side of the matter is that the people who enjoyed the old quest-grind-trial model didn't get the play experience they hoped for. Would you have liked the relic quest more if it had been released in 3.1 and if it had included unlocking the Diadem and coin farming?
The relic being outdated (i.e. equal to other weapons) is expected though. Otherwise new players would never be able to get into raiding on an equal footing and the already small raiding scene would suffer. For the new player it would feel like the housing situation: too late to get a fair chance. I don't think the relic will be left completely behind though. There will be more steps to do in future patches. 210 item level will give a nice boost to tackling 3.2 content. The point when the relic will really be outdated is at the end of the expansion.
with my 7 zeta just becoming glamour pieces I cannot imagine spending the time and gil to even finishing one of these things through the entirety of 3.x
Cannot imagine being done in just a few days. That is...dedication? ....is that the word I'm looking for?
Yep, I will just stick with dedication...
The relic being "outdated" doesn't just mean that if you have your i210 version it becomes the lesser model to all the higher item level stuff that gets released in 3.2... it's actually that the majority of players (with the exception of this random Japanese nobody that apparently has plenty of time on his hands) will still be holding onto the i200 version, working on the i210, when all the i215-225 stuff gets released. Meaning they'll still have to catch up to what's released currently before moving onto the next step. This wouldn't be an issue if the relic was released earlier in this... [I'm not even gonna call it an expansion, it's just a content patch...] patch's lifespan. With that said, and this is where a lot of peoples' frustrations lie, it also wouldn't be such a punch in the face for those (like me) who refuse to grind continuously like this guy did if it was in fact released... I don't know... 3-4 months ago? Then we wouldn't be doing a couple more month's worth of daily grinding that we really could have, and should have, already been able to be doing so that normal people would be finishing it up just before, or right about when, 3.2 gets released. I don't know anyone who wasn't disappointed when patch notes rolled out for 3.1 and saw that relics weren't included there. Obviously they already had this shit made, and there's no reason they couldn't have released it 2-3 months after HW went live. "But they were on vacation!" So, they couldn't have had one person go into the office and hit the button to apply the changes to the live servers during any of the random maintenance periods? The whole thing is just sloppy. It's not what I expect from the development team that turned around a project as miraculously as can be said for how the original Final Fantasy turned around Square's future from the very beginning.
TL;DR I share the sentiments of the OP this post. I love this game for what it is. It's a Final Fantasy, and the base structure of that is what keeps my subscription... for now.
Aside from what is pretty on point in the rest of your post, this in itself is dubious. I don't know wtf kind of work ethic they have in Japan but there's no way in hell your entire staff can take off in America, especially if it affects production deadlines. I honestly doubt what they say about vacation is even remotely true.