I just don't get it.

[SaitoHikari]

Oh, you also haven't noticed. This community loves responding to discontent (albeit very well thought out discontent) with "just quit" or the ever lovely "Just take a break".
Its all an illusion, everyone here is entralled, any and all opinion that tries to break this illusion will be met with extreme resistance.
I for one am extremely jaded because everyone simply does not see the hamster wheel around them, the golden prison bars.
To cope, I play this game mostly to enjoy the company of close friends, everything else is unimportant.

It's probably because many people here have likely come from games where the hamster wheel is much, MUCH worse in comparison.

The game I came from, Dragon Nest, was notorious for making your gear worthless within MONTHS if you didn't have the absolute best raid gear. And by worthless I mean absolutely worthless. It had several tiers of gear at level cap, of which the highest tier was reserved for raiders. Thing is that gear was completely untradeable, and while the same may be said of FFXIV, gearing in that game also had a super RNG layer known as 'enhancement' that is far, FAR worse than materia overmelding. For one, enhancement basically made up like 50% of an item's stats, the game doesn't even TELL you the success rate, and it basically got to the point where even for fresh endgame gear, you were better off continuing using your old gear until you could scrounge up the funds to enhance. If you ever could.

Basically, imagine if overmelding additionally cost you 1 million gil per attempt, and the materia made up like 75% of the item's stats. That's basically enhancing endgame gear in DN in a nutshell. It was even worse for the highest tier raid gear, where the costs of enhancement are basically 10x that of the other tiers. Sure, the piece of gear would last you like a year if not longer, but due to the super RNG heavy nature, you could break your bank and get nothing out of it in return. Not only that, but the stat bloat became so insane that for level capped characters, jumping from the gearing tier below raid gear and using the top tier raid gear itself could pretty much boost your stats by as much as 50%. So imagine what kind of stats were needed for even casual content.

The hilarious part is that everyone with the top raid gear basically just sits around in towns all day complaining that the game is dead because there's nothing worth doing until the next raiding tier is out.