I disagree on the balance in difficulty to an extent. You can just burn to 50 on FATES if you wish and not know the job. Dungeons do need a bit more incentive to play at lower levels but they teach you to do your job properly and give you the concept on what to do in harder dungeons. Do most people ignore them? Yeah they do which is sad. I spent countless hours with friends doing dungeons over and over in hopes to get some of the special gear in there but to mostly no luck. Longstop teaches you minor character positioning with the boss spewing poison pools and then also teaches the tank about moving with the boss. Cutters teaches you to dance the dance. Stone vigil again is about knowing your position to the bosses position.
FFXI took forever to get new shit out really. Oh an expansion? Here have the base region, about 10% of the story and half the functioning stuff that should be there. I remember ToAU it took them quite some time to even get the rental chocobo guy in there.Even longer for other stuff. Missions were usually like 2-3 things a month and didn't finish up the story til the next expansion was really announced. FFXI included stuff in updates, FFXIV will include stuff in updates. We didn't magically get all the spells and skills in 1 single expansion/update. It took fucking forever for them come to us.