Are we as players afraid of a challenge?

[Skivvy]

Let's kill this nonsense trope right here. North American players have never minded a challenge as long as the rewards were commensurate with that challenge. Who wanted to fight Kirin knowing that it could just drop an Earth crystal? That made people feel like suckers in XI. Anyone honest with themselves would question a challenge's worth if it offered little reward for much risk. That's why Abyssea did so well in XI and why much of XIV's content is doing well.

Grinds are only as tolerable as the end reward allows.

Abyssea was absolutely not a smash hit for XI, and has been blamed for ruining XI as it had been known. This caused a good amount of people to leave the game and spawned an insane number of requests for SE to roll back to "pre-abyssea" days.