The formula/ treadmill/ disposable gear problem with this game is probably the thing I dislike the most. To me it's a very complicated problem though.

I played FFXI and I know how all of that worked. Put simply it wouldn't work well here and now. The environment is just too different for that. Further, one of the ways that FFXI allowed gear to stay relevant for so long was through mid battle gear swapping -- a practice that I don't think anyone actually wants to bring back. Without that, all of your niche pieces of gear become useless. Gear that reduces damage taken and little else? Useless. 2 mp/ tick refresh but terrible damage stats? Garbage. Tons of fast cast but no damage/ accuracy? Not going to use it.

That said, XIV is well overdue for a stat revamp. They need to add more diverse and interesting stats. Gear is just too boring. When I played XI I'd eagerly read through the mined data (because patch noted showed no equipment) to see what cool new things they added. With XIV they give you a table in the patch notes to show you what gear was added and its item level, and after the patch is live you can check the stats on the website for anything, but there's not much point.

I think SE are afraid of giving players the ability to make their character the 'wrong way', even if it wouldn't be permanent anyway. Since everyone's going to math out the best gear/ abilities/ rotations/ whatever, they seem to have conceded that there's no point in having a choice to begin with. More than that, they're obsessed with making sure every class is as close to balanced with each other as possible, possibly at the expense of more interesting gameplay/ equipment.

I think they need to take a more horizontal approach. I'm not saying stop the vertical climb, but maybe slow it down, add variety in itemization, and add/ utilize more routes to endgame (or endgame ready) gear. Maybe make the rewards from your 2 highest dungeons different from each other, and different from the 2 that were just kicked down the ladder? If gear lasts longer, you can create a whole subsystem of customizing it separately from (or perhaps and extension of) the materia system that's a lot more appealing than adding more of the same boring secondary stats.