The thing is, you can't compare anima weapon to Zodiac. Zodiac was BIS and the culmination of a year worth of grinding, so of course the capstone quest to make it is going to be extremely obnoxious. For most of the jobs, the anima weapon isn't even BIS and takes as much time and money as Zodiac to make.

Even if you say "well, relic tier 1 was hard", consider that you needed the following to make a relic weapon:
One (1) crafted item with a specific materia meld (and you could do the craft/meld yourself if you had a crafter)
Two (2) intermediate items from quest-specific duties (Hydra, Chimera)
Three (3) items that came from the current relevant primal fights (Titan, Garuda, Ifrit)

The difficulty in making a relic came from failing Titan HM over and over, not from needing to plonk 4-6 million gil on HQ crafted items and grind 29,000 tomes of philosophy/mythology.