As I and many others have said many times. People want rewards that feel valuable and worth something and wont just be tossed the next patch.. Even If you take 370 savage gear what really is it useful or needed for? Everything in the game can be easily smashed with gear 20-30 item levels lower than that.. So you don't need that gear for anything current. And it will be trash when 4.4 lands and people can just buy or craft 380 stuff. Or get it from the normal raids. Thus the gear has no purpose or value.. Which is why these topics keep coming up
In itself no. But you could be pretty certain that if the rewards from said contents were better and more valuable then more people would be more inclined to try. As said before what you get out has to be worth what you put in. Where as now its common to see people say they just wait till they can unsync something or massively over power it because the rewards arent worth doing it now or when it's current.
Do not later when the lower effort required is more inline with the rewards value.
Regarding gear though. It may be true you don't see many dedicated skill speed builds or something but its equally true that many people just don't care for the stats in general.
"Oh my current body is 350 this one is 360 I'll buy and equip it."
What the stats are isn't even considered because I level is the only one that really matters. No one's cares if the 350 body had crit and the 360 has skill speed instead. All they look at is the item level Another reason why gear is cheap , dull and most players still never really invest and meld it.
Compare it to say glamour. Where people will often spend tens of millions of gil on a glamour item or 30 million gil on a pegasus whistle because it's worth something to them. But spend 100k on materia to improve there stats on there gear. No chance. Waste of money.... which is why people often say glamour is the endgame. Because it's the only thing that has any form of value.
Which is why quite a few players will put significantly more effort into getting a glamour piece than they will getting one that is actually an upgrade..