I don't enjoy Occult Crescent

Not bellyaching or doomposting, just voicing my opinion here because not enough Western players actually do tbh. I kinda liked Eureka but it feels like each iteration has just gotten worse and i probably won't engage with it in future personally.

imo;
Farming CEs just isn't fun (and having to walk to them now??)

Relic Armour makes the initial bar for entry incredibly bleh, since OC only becomes vaguely enjoyable once you've grinded out a set and can actually contribute/not feel like a burden - It reminds me of old PvP where the only ones actually having fun were the few people had that otherwise useless Gear
--Similiarly i don't enjoy having to level Knowledge and a dozen subclasses. This stuff all makes OC feel very boring at the beginning, and decidely less casual since it almost feels like more effort than raiding at this point

Theres a distinct lack of forward momentum as well. It never felt like i was actually making any progress with the Relic frankly

and finally smaller DCs just don't have the population for this sort of content. EU being split across 2 DCs dramatically shortens the lifespan of this already very short-lived content (and i dread to think what its like on OCE)

As a long time player, I think i just fundamentally do not enjoy these types of Relic quests. I liked HW's. That's all (love the new Deep Dungeon though)

I find occult crescent ok because farming fates is quick but not completely braindead (except perhaps if you play a tank so you can ignore most of the mechanics at the cost of killing things slowly, I frankly don't understand why so many people do that - this kind of low risk, low reward approach is just a bad deal in terms of having fun) and it's a good source of gil (mostly because of fortune carrots but I'm nevertheless more than happy to relieve terminally crazy achievement chasers of their money)

The relic, I don't really care about. I went in not expecting to see the relic grind through but I got it pretty much as a side effect of farming the place for gil. It's just that I can't really care about those "rewards" that the game pretty much expect everybody to have and you are just going through the motion to get them. I found it neither more or less enjoyable than getting the relic with just tomestones in EW.

Re: relic armor, I decided to not bother with that at all because screw hauling a whole additional set of gear just for that one place

I will note you are overestimating the effect of the arcanauts armour by the way, it’s basically like 15% at most even when you have the forked tower upgrades