Dredgion is still the most fun thing in Aion, at least for me.
The most recent update did some changes. Now some mini bosses does drop upgrade items, allowing for different strategies. If you want the upgrade items, your group can rush and kill the mini bosses asap and forget about the score, but if your team want the Win reward there's the classic strategy.

It could work with FFXIV. Reward for win could be Tomes and some special reward to upgrade PVP stats/actions, while the minibosses drop some material item for materia, maybe a new system that needs a certain amount of that material to unlock the materia slots, or even additional slots that only add stats towards PVP zones.

What really lacks in FFXIV is competitiveness. In Aion we do PvE to improve faster in PvP, I like this idea. In the end of the day, what's the big deal of getting the BiS? I fail to find any value in it if it'll be trashed in the next patch, or even only being used to do the same thing you are already doing. I would like to do PVP to get something for my PvE, and vice versa. Now they are mostly separate things. Craft could have so much potential with PVP too. So little progression for PVP...