Wow just read through this and I can't wait to tackle this new dungeon. However to touch on what Gifthorse has mentioned and I know I will get burned for this but what has the rest of the dev team been doing?

Ok so they are using a pre-existing zone that's fine as it is one we have not had access to anyway but does this mean that the area designers are hard at work on the zone redesign? I don't know I just have a feeling that SE is not telling the whole story here.

I have always felt that the game was not lacking content because it wasn't finished but more because the content was ripped out prior to launch while they figured out what they were going to do with the underlying mechanics of the game. I just have a feeling this dungeon is part of that ripped out content that they have just adjusted to work with the new mechanics. If that's true it's not necessarily a bad thing, it could mean they have lots of content ready to go and are just waiting for the core to get fixed and everything finalised before they start putting everything back in.

There is just something a bit off with this, they have a huge team 100+ if I recall correctly and they pulled their top talent from other projects to help with the rebuild of FFXIV, so you would think they would be a bit further along with all this stuff now.

Who knows though, maybe they do have a load of stuff ready for 1.20 and just want to get mechanics and core gameplay elements finalised in 1.18 and 1.19.