Who here is also burned out from farming?

[Felis]

What was different was the gear. There was no ilvl, it was more about character progression then gear.

If you had the choice to get a green (normal dungeon gear) or a blue gear (DL gear) from Cutters Cry, which one would you want?
Just because there was no ilevel written in the gear info don't mean that there was not one in form of the amount of stats.
Another example: Ifrit weapon versus Garuda weapon. Both were for level 50, and still a Garuda weapon was much better than a Ifrit weapon because of the higher dps stat.
Gear progession was not horizontal in 1.0 . Maybe not so much vertical like in ARR, a bit more diagonal, but not a single bit horizontal.

Also...we could be social. The battle system was different...we...we could actually talk while playing without voice or macros!! It was amazing!

Not before auto-attack got implemented.