The game is more dead than it was pre-3.1

[BreathlessTao]

I gotta say, as sad as it is, I agree with OP. I've seen friends leaving the game (quit or just "taking a break" is irrelevant in this case) - or having left, thinking they'd be back for 3.1, and they never came back. I've had people saying during the HW-drought "wait for 3.1, everyone will be back and things will be super busy again", only to see...nothing changing with 3.1.

LoV, as was predicted, ended up being pretty much DoA (from what I can tell anyway, in the "area" I know about), which is doubly unfortunate considering the amount of time and energy put into its development that could've been used for other things. Void Ark is ... idek, I'm completely neutral about it, run it once for the Farthing and if I get another piece of loot I need/want, it's good, if not - no headaches; the quests/story for it however I did find kinda lacking and short tbh, which I'm sure doesn't contribute to anything positive. The Diadem ... er, well, besides apparently having turned out to be a fustercluck from what could be seen in the forums, personally I still haven't even set foot there at all and it doesn't even feel like I'm missing anything. And somewhere between these two, the additional issue of the broken Duty Finder (I won't be convinced that these had nothing to do with it, both are instanced content and more often than not I only see "reserving instance" when queueing for a duty, instead of the roles filling up) really ruined the atmosphere even more.

The Arboretum is nice, Pharos is...well frankly I've been bored of goblins since Brayflox HM and bored of aether crystals since the original Pharos, so that's just meh. Both in those as well as in VA though, I do have an issue with so many enemies being not much more than incredibly overdone HP-sponges, it's mind-numbing that we (whether it's 4 of us or 24, although the latter is more frustrating I guess) keep hitting them for so long and it barely amounts to anything at all when it comes to actually beating them.
The Vanu Vanu ... well let's face it, even that ended up being bugged, and let's not even talk about how confusing the progression on that became. (Currently I'm at 1700/1730, which is on a sidenote another "screw this" type of artificially prolonging content, because, 30 points, really, gimme a break - especially when lots of others have already completed rank 8, people who didn't fall victim to the bugs of it.)
Tomestone upgrade in hunts once more ... sure we can do "private" dailies, which yield 870 seals per week - too bad we need 6×500=3000 to upgrade just one piece of armor (and 2000 for one accessory). A form of content, I guess, but a drought is not made any more bearable with menial, tedious, repetitive tasks. (And of course there's still no upgrading the weapon this way, either.)
Honestly, the part I liked (and perhaps looked forward to) the most was the continuation of the story - at least that part did deliver, in my eyes anyway, but then again I am biased when it comes to Alphinaud. /shrug
edit: I'm reminded that there's also Thordan Ex. Welp. The fact that I need to be reminded of that speaks for how relevant/significant it is as far as I'm concerned. I haven't even picked up the quest at all, and honestly with how the PF was filled with "know the fight" ads once again (on friggin' day 1, I might add), I don't even feel like I want to touch it any time soon either. /shrug

So all in all, my personal experience is: here I am in 3.1, figuratively staring at the desiccated, decaying corpses of friends who've left so long ago and never felt like returning; and the thing I spend the most time doing is leveling up my other battle classes. Which is I think the farthest away from having anything to do with any new content. And more often than not I notice I'm simply - fatigued. Exhausted. It irritates me, it frustrates me, it makes me angry, to the point where I just quit at points where I used to be going on, pushing on, working on those things, because I had the time and the opportunity and felt like I could do it. It's quite simply sad.
The game on a whole might be thriving; the situation might be completely different in Japan (lets face it, that's what really matters); and obviously, this is just one side of the coin... but I have a feeling about as many of us are seeing this side as the other, brighter one.