That's not entirely accurate. When Seeker's hit, the original areas were perfectly manageable in Abyssea Gear... and not even completed sets at that. As they expanded territory and added harder and harder content, yes... you got into that area where you needed to gear up higher for those deeper areas. But, you were just fine in 6 month to 1 year old gears at initial launch and going forward in the first zones. They had also nerfed so much of that process that it was laughably easy to get those older gears as well--I SOLOED complete Abyssea sets to +2 status FFS.
That's something that seems to be getting lost here. This is the initial launch of the areas, and it is going to be designed to be a challenge for the lvl 50-60 players that are decently geared. Eventually, they will be releasing higher tiers. It won't be all that much different to the scaling that went on with the expansion packs in XI and the level cap increases there. When each of the TAU and WoTG xpacs were released, there were lots of players that struggled with it. A year later, it was just another normal area. A few years later... a cakewalk. Who would have ever thought one day you could DUO Odin and Alex, but we did it shortly after they took us past the level 75 caps. Killed sky gods with a normal 6 man party without breaking a sweat... the hardest part was not getting lost on the maps.
The point is, there is a pattern to these things. It is Incredibly Tough at first, then gradually become a Decent Challenge, and then is reduced to Easy Prey and Too Weak. It is nothing new. All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.
