To be honest, Alex Savage is a failure.

[Klamor]

This is also a Final Fantasy title, where storyline and narrative are the bulk of every title of the franchise, in case you haven't picked that up yet. SE values giving everyone the chance to experience a new story, without struggle, over making sure they keep your sword sharpened.

This is also an MMO, which in case you haven't picked that up yet, are based around group play and the defeating of powerful enemies that threaten the world in which we play. There wouldn't even be a purpose to this world if it weren't for the Garlean Empire threatening Eorzea, calling down Dalamud, and releasing Bahamut upon the world. Sure, we can just go through solo and pretend we're actually doing something while we auto-attack our way to victory... maybe that's exactly what you wanna do... and I bet you can have your story handed to you elsewhere, like a book maybe.

This is one of the things why we can't have nice things (together with "you need to be forced into groups 24/7"). These kind of arguments need to die hard. It's why we have a wishy-washy system and constantly repeating content

We're not talking about 24/7 here. You've got the entirety of the MSQ and a significant amount of side quests/story that you can do all by your little lonesome. Poor you for having to actually get a group together to witness the climax of that big bad that's threatening to destroy the world as you know it. It's truly the argument of having everything handed to you for nothing that needs to die hard.

The current normal mode serves to both bring that story to as much of the fanbase as possible and provide a stepping stone of gear to work with.

I already referred to this in a previous post. That's the way it's been designed, yes. It's a terrible design at that. Unfortunately, we have to depend on the in-flow of casual money to keep an MMO afloat because there aren't enough actual raiders to pay the server costs.

so about the "release savage first, then normal in a catch up patch idea"...

This would work great if SE actually designed the rest of the endgame content to match that plan. As it stands now, there is no actual worthwhile endgame content that leads up to Savage mode. Not like when Coil was the end raid and you had Darklight and Tomestones of Mythology to get gear. They released the 24-man Labyrinth of the Ancients (and its ensuing "sequels") as that buffer between Darklight and Myth (and their later equivalents), to ease the gear curve getting into Coil. As it stands now, that gear curve is essentially Normal Mode being your Darklight gear-level, with the Tomestone gear being the "filler" until ultimately you're fully geared in the Tomestone gear. So, what exactly is the purpose of the Extreme Primals? A weapon? Again, that's based on the actual unfortunate design that the weapon is the single-most powerful upgrade per slot that you can obtain because of Weapon Damage being weighted so heavily. There's truly no legitimate reason why Extreme Primals can't also drop gear that is of equal item level, or item level +5, of what's dropped in the 24-man raid or the Normal-mode of the Raid. Hell, even when Void Ark got released it nullified any actual gain from the gear received from Normal. The only thing that kept people still running Gordias Normal was that VA was locked at one drop per week.