Yoshi-P on Character Growth

[Zumi]

It opens up the ability to gear up multiple jobs. Hardcore/world-firsters can go for that slight upgrade. More casual players can go for their choice of content, even if it's slightly inferior, because it's good enough.

One example we already have is our 24-man raids. They're clearly inferior yet people do them anyway. Under a more horizonal system, it wouldn't be inferior; it would be on par.

I wouldn't want to see FFXI style gearing in FFXIV. This is what kind of turned FFXI into a chat room and lead a lot of people to not do the new content. Horizontal progression is an oxymoron it doesn't really exist what FFXI had was vertical progression on a very small scale. What you already said the upgrades were minor. For example FFXI came out with a medium difficulty event Salvage. It had drop rates on nms in the zone in the range of around 1%. I actually knew people who killed this turtle NM 300+ times for the monk body. But the itemization was that a several of the pieces were worse had worse stats then gear from 6 years ago that dropped from Sky or hnms, however about half of those pieces of gear that were very slightly better maybe had 1-3 more attack or accuracy or 1% more haste something really small. The hard core playerbase in FFXI were like yea I am going to run Salvage daily even though it has 1% drop rates for those really small upgrades which may effect character damage by around 1% but its best in slot. However the more casual players were like I am not doing this it doesn't offer a big enough upgrade I am good with my sky gear from 6 years ago.

So for these players who didn't want to run the new content for the small upgrades they quit never bought the next expansion which was Wings of the Goddess. Some of them just logged in the game used it as a chat room. Many people will not do content with really small upgrades.