I'm shocked people are citing Blizzard and WoW as POSITIVE examples in this thread and others like it :/ You know... the company that openly mocks its fanbase, sells twitter/selfie cam as major content patches, constantly uses corporate double talk to make excuses for their laziness, enforces a raid or die mentality and routinely goes 12+ months without adding any content while still charging a sub. But hey at least they "shake" things up every xpac... by gutting classes, professions, leveling ect... so it is even easier to start raiding on day 1 with zero effort invested.

Regardless I've said this before but whenever I hear "vets" complain about FF14 they are simply fed up with the modern mmo genre as a whole. It is a endless hamster wheel that constantly dangles gear in-front of you as a carrot and FF14, being a heavily instance PVE focused mmo, completely follows this formula. There are more sand box or "retro" style mmos out there that can suit your desires but do keep in mind other people like the current model just fine. Plus SE does try to experiment with new side content fairly regularly even if said content often does not go over well with us as a community.

Oh and one final note... the tomestone grind that people constantly complain about... that's basically the valor system from WoW. A system people in WoW have been begging for years to have implemented back in because they hate the systems they have recently had. Personally I'll take the tomestone grind every time.