The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[Cilia]

I think people are reading too much into that, though.

There's not a whole lot to read too much into. It was all but stated verbatim that, in order to keep Gordias Savage weapons be the quickest way to an i210 weapon, and due to Gordias Savage being deemed too hard, they purposely overdid it with the Anima Weapon quest.

The successor to the Zodiac weapons, Anima weapons, have been implemented; however, their balance is directly linked to the item levels of the rewards for Alexander: Gordias (Savage).

Since it is currently only possible to obtain an item level 210 weapon from Alexander: Gordias (Savage), the time and effort required to create an Anima weapon was set to be roughly the same level with this as a benchmark. ... Furthermore, with the difficulty of Savage being very high, Anima weapons have become the sole option for obtaining item level 210 weapons for some, and we understand there is an issue with there being no other options. ..To repeat what I said earlier, we made mistakes with the setting of the difficulty for Alexander: Gordias (Savage) and the item level of the rewards, which affected the content that came afterwards leading up to Patch 3.15. We are reflecting on this problem, and based on everyone’s feedback we will be revamping the balance of the game from Patch 3.2 onwards.

The main problem that gets me with these kinds of things is a lack of visible progress for a given quantity of effort. That's why the Atma / Luminous Crystal grind is so irritating - you can expend a huge amount of effort and get nowhere. The Animus books were not so bad, because you could hop on and see visible progress within a matter of minutes (assuming you had an incomplete book). The Novus was not so bad - a daily roulette (which most people do anyway) and a quick treasure hunt later and you were good. (It only got really bad and really expensive if you just had to have optimized stats. I put Skill Speed on my NIN weapon to help mitigate the cost of crit and DET Materia.) Again, the Nexus stage I couldn't stomach when it was current due to the excessive grind. Never got to the Zodiac or Zeta stage when they were current either, but I doubt I'd have enjoyed them due to RNG, massive money / crafting (to include desynthesis) requirements, and grinding.

The grind itself is bad. It feels excessive, even with the numerous ways you can get items. Tacking on HQ crafted merchant items just feels like adding insult to injury since, again, casual / solo players are unlikely to have the gathering / crafting skills or money necessary to get them. (Even if they went down to ~200k / item from the current sitting at ~750k / item, it would damn near bankrupt me.) The only thing we got in response to this and the RNG was "it's designed for players who want to spend time getting it instead of doing difficult content," but the time is excessive for the reward this time around and the RNG / money issue wasn't properly addressed.

... in my opinion, anyway.

EDIT
I understand the gist of what he's trying to say is "Anima Weapons are i210 because that's the current maximum item level obtainable from Gordias Savage and we don't want to exceed that," but the rest is still valid (see Yoshi-P's comments' on the excessive amount of time and again, the lack of addressing the RNG / crafted item issue). And again, it's not that I don't understand where they're coming from, but if they acknowledge they made Gordias Savage too hard, then say they wanted the Anima weapon quest to simulate that difficulty in a single-player experience, they're basically admitting they made the Anima Weapon quest (specifically Step 3) too hard.