Quote Originally Posted by MistakeNot View Post
Problem with this is that it would really mess up the story timeline. We can, for example, not enter Ishgard until certain events in the MSQ has made it possible for our characters to do so. For many dungeons, the reason our characters go into them, is beacuse of events in the MSQ. Etc, etc.
Now, some people will of course not care at all if they skip backwards and forwards in the story, because they did not care about the story in the first place.
For many of us it is quite important to have things happen in the right order though, and for us your "solution" would make the games story a tangled and near incoherent mess.
We can already go talk to Urianger about Extreme Primals or Coil during Shadowbringers. We can already start Coil right after talking to Alisae in Doma. We can do Omega without touching Alexander. We can run, start to finish, the Crystal Tower questline right after running some dungeons with Exarch in Shadowbringers. We can have Krile in Eureka, while also having her in Azys Lla looking into the Warring Triad. We can have job quests introduce to us and constantly talk about abilities we don't get and may never be getting again, such as Royal Road! We can start the DRG quest and antagonize Estinien long after making a close friend of him.

These things do not matter nearly as much as you seem to think they do, and if they ever did the ball has long been dropped.

Making the MSQ an optional undertaking would increase the enjoyment of many at the cost of a piddly few, and those piddly few can still do the MSQ in the proper order before doing anything else just like they have to now. Why would you care how total strangers experience the MSQ anyway?