Aw, nostalgia. <3 Love the OP, and I know exactly how you feel, actually, but I think you're conflating a sense of exploration and making new friends with the XP grind itself, and I'm not sure that those two things are as linked as you think they are. At least, I hope they're not; they're not in my experience (I had a lot of fun - more fun - exploring XI, for example, when I was at max level, for example) and also...

For every happy nostalgia-filter thought there, you're skipping the mindless drudgery of trying to get a PT, waiting around for hours, not being able to XP because some jackass had trained the entire zone up through Garlaige - I wound up quitting the game for about a year at 32 because in order to do anything with my friends, I had to spend months grinding, none of my friends could XP with me because there was no level sync, and I couldn't even get XP; I had to level my White Mage sub and I had joined three consecutive Valkurm parties that ended in fire and misery, and I'd just had enough.

Admittedly, I have the good memories too - meeting people, sometimes never even seeing them again for two years and then running into them in Jeuno and laughing and smiling, whatever - but I think it's really easy to let the nostalgia filter narrow the field for us, and only remember the good things and none of the bad. (Heck, even in XIV it's easier to remember the fun of trying to make it to every aetheryte on my old character, or make fun of being chained to a wall in the Alchemist's Guild crunching crystals for all of my friends, even though at the time the game was completely unplayable. >_>)

I'd also like to see a wider variety of stuff to do at level cap, given the developers' limited resources, at least at first, which means I agree with their focus on L50 content to the exclusion of lower-level content, which is part of their justification for not giving a damn how quickly people get to L50.

(However, the OP still made me smile. Thanks for sharing your memories! ^^)