Ranking up, Behest and NM
Currently one of the biggest issue about ranking up is that our only goal is to get to rank 50.
In others mmo while ranking up we could set our "personal goals", in Aion for instance we wanted mid rank gear, dropped by NM inside dungeons (Nochsana Taining Camp, Fire Temple, Steel Rake...). The drop rate was awful, we had to do tons of runs before we could see something valuable, but the thing is that at that point we gained several ranks so the grinding process was alleviated.
In FFXIV we have nothing like that, our only goal is getting to r50 and we feel every single rank as a pain.
But I think we have already the right medium to implement these things: Behest. If you think about it they're like a lot of mini dungeons spread all over Eorzea. The only point is that they're not enough challenging or rewarding.
So here's my suggestion: make Behests harder, make them last a bit longer and once all of the mobs are killed make a NM pop (not something too hard, let's say something in line with faction's NM) that could drop a nice mid rank unique gear (or material, or runestone, or whatever can be considered a goal).
With a better loot system and once the party size will be lowered from 15 to 8/4 I think this system would alleviate a lot the ranking up process, would give us a goal to reach every 10 ranks and would mitigate the congestion of players at the same camp.
The best part is that I guess this would be something easy to implement since it would be something built on an already existing feature and still it would bring a lot of content to the game.