We Really Need To Talk About The State And Path Of FFXIV

[Sigma-Astra]

And yet, hard work via mining, blacksmithing, woodcutting, fishing, ect, in Old School Runescape equals reward with money. More hard work means more money. The more money you earn, the better gear you can get until you have the best.
Hard Work in FFXIV is gated. Hard Work is only rewarded by a very narrow set of FFXIV game mechanics and the rewards are spiritbound. That armor was earned in Runescape, it was not just handed out. More importantly the player had more freedom in acquiring that armor via the player-driven economy.

Not necessarily and you're purposely being incredibly narrow in your views to only see what you want to see and nothing else because it benefits your narrative and nothing more than that.

A person who has maxed out their gathering and crafting jobs can easily funnel a lucrative and monetary supply in buying or making the pentameld crafting gear for battle classes.

You do have other variables and options towards gear that is relatively close towards BiS, it's just not THE perfect BiS which bursts your bubble and quite frankly, if you're not doing Savage raiding and seeking to improve your actual knowledge and skills with your chosen main class or multiple classes, then no, you don't need the highest ilvl that's achievable without putting in the same actual mechanical requirements.

Anyone can level their botanist, miner, and crafting class towards acceptable and good standards with the maximum efficiency, it's not mechanically hard, it's just tedious....not everyone can play their battle class under fire and make rapid, sometimes good and sometimes bad decisions, in the heat of a moment when you have no idea if it'll cost you or the rest of your team their lives, therefore wiping the run entirely.

Those are the standards that set you apart from the raiders. Tedious work does not and has never equaled the same factor as actual skill, it merely measures in how much patience you have and time on your hands.

I do tedious work at my jobs all of the time, it's not hard work, it's just there to give me something to do and stretch out the hours. That's all it is. There's no possible way that I can compare the tedious work of, let's say, shifting through a catalog and marking which chairs are out of stock and which ones aren't towards the person in the warehouse actually doing the physical lifting and labor of loading heavy objects onto shelves all day long.

There's a stark difference. Both are work, but one requires a bit more mechanical knowledge than the other. Savage raiding is no different. Why should a person who's only good at wasting time fishing be given the same gear as the person who completed God Kefka? It literally makes no sense at all. And don't you dare say fishing is mechanically hard in XIV. I've had harder times fishing in Dark Cloud of all places or XV.

You get rewarded with the best gear based on how much effort and skills you have, not how much time you can waste.

This also isn't Runescape, this is XIV. It's not going to be what you find in Runescape no matter how much you physically want it to be. You're comparing apples to oranges and it's not a good point.