Thats true but i delibritly said "big rewards", i mean would there be as much as complaint if the title would be exclusiv only and not the minion? I would say rather not, so the minion is percieved as the "Better" reward. And the best vanity reward is that what is percived as the best, because ofc vanity doesnt give gameplay advantage. So i dont know how incentivising it is to reward only with "minor rewards".
Also, even when its a bit of off topic:
Yeah i also dont think that only focus on one player group in a mmo which is a as big as FFXIV is not a good thing, however this go for all player groups really. If you center your whole game and reward structure arround midcore, or even lowcore, players, games got boring as hell, then maybe you have clearrates of 99 % but you have also saturation and resignattion. I think there should be always a reward structure on the top end of an MMO where the player at least have the aspiration to pursue higher level content, and reading the last Yoshida interview he thinks on that line as well. I also dont agree that this being a PVE heavy game justfices as you say there is no challange in pve just grind. There is challenging pve content out there and actually i think alot of the problem with the relic weapons came from that people want the best rewards, doesnt want to the hardest content, but also dont want a tedious long grind which seems unreasonable for the most people if i look at the criticisim. So essentialy there is a group of people who want rewards for being not good in the game, and doesnt want even have secondary progression path which is the only reward path that exist beside the Skillcheck path in mmos, timesink. I dont see how this game, or any other game as we seen example of this in the other MMOs, suceed because of that. This only results in the already mentioned saturation and resignation and then top player base leaves and then there is also nothing to aspire for.
That said the post you linked has good ideas tho, and i also agreeing that this game has a problem with PVP playerbase, i would suggest the idea to derank people overall who dont play in a specific amount of time.