The general player base needs to improve

[KaivaC]

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Players will be players, unfortunately. Sadly, healers are far too strong that they could easily fix mistakes made in dungeons, and the dungeons themselves aren't really interesting enough once you get out a lot of the pre-60 dungeons that encourages more than the bare minimum to get through them. It isn't as though the devs can do anything about healing potential either, because that balancing will have a huge effect across the game. I think we might just need better dungeons, ones that subtly take away from AOE emphasis and more on role specific stuff. I mean, we're starting to have to use AOEs more now in raids...so I wonder if regular mobs in a run could start encouraging the using the ST skills.

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Eventually, yes, make it so that we'll come to a point where Expert dungeons can harshly punish mistakes. But the way things are set up now, that shouldn't happen until the end of 5.0 when you unlock those exclusive Expert dungeons after whatever story is in there. The game has room for gradual difficulty. You can't just suddenly throw in Nid Hard bosses - that will definitely kill Expert runs right now. You say that gradual and optional is dumb, yet you fail to recognize that some of us have already thrown in some ideas on how this could work, whereas, once again, you have not provided anything and now you're on the 'git gud' train. Some of these dungeons shouldn't be labeled 'Expert' if they are practically no different from the rest of the other dungeons, save for the level and the scenery. Lemme pose another question.

This one is specifically for you, Riyah.

What's wrong with having optional, harder dungeons that actually feel like Expert? If they are harder and the rewards are increased enough that they offer rewards like just-below-raid-level gear, materia, exclusive mounts, maybe even tomestones that you can find during a run (though those will have to be capped...maybe implement a system where these harder, Expert dungeons can give you tomestones around 200 above the weekly cap), how is that a bad thing?

See, I just threw in some ideas and incentives just in my response to you.