Tanaka was Right!

[Gwaeron]

1.23b was awesome. Admittedly built on the broken infrastructure and engines of the initial 1.0.
It grinds my gears when people lump all of 1.x together. No-one will argue that 1.0 sucked. But I, and others that I know, definitely loved 1.19, 1.21 and beyond when all of the systems were pretty much completely remade.

1.23b was full of potential - all of those dangerous areas with level 50-99 enemies, all of those locations, such as dungeons, that clearly had been added for some reason but later were never realized.

Open world dungeons.
Notorious monsters.
Movement inertia (debatable. Inconvenient sometimes, but it's never FELT so good just running around in any other game).

A wide and varied difficulty range of content, some which was progress by grinding and some which was progress by skill, all the way from solo-grinding Toto-Rak to attempting to beat Rivenroad (Extreme) which was hard as hell, or getting Darklight gear by grinding semi-difficult dungeons.

Faction leves that actually had interesting bosses and interesting missions (such as the one where you needed to split the party into two and ride different ways across La Noscea to kill two cyclops).

Interesting quest storylines with amazing cutscenes. Job quests weren't pointless solo missions about hitting a button for five minutes, they were actual battles. DoL and DoH quests weren't just "get me 10 of this thing". They actually had instances. BSM/ARM had a completely separate zone, an island in La Noscea where a Siren resided. You and Mimidoa were wearing earplugs, so the entire quest was kind of a mystery/puzzle where you couldn't hear the NPCs talk (but they tried to trick you to remove the earplugs). MIN had a quest where you had to dig traps for pursuers while an NPC tried to escape.

People like to say that there was nothing to do in 1.0, which is pretty true. But I think there was way more to do in 1.23 than there has been ever since. It wasn't just dungeon-and-FATE-spam. Basically all (battle) content we have now, except for FATEs, existed back then. And in addition we also had factions, caravan, Hamlet Defense, Skirmish, behests.

Some of these challenges were poorly implemented (Ifrit's eruption lag), some of them were nice ideas on paper but could use some improvement (Hamlet Defense), some of them were amazing (GC quests). But near the end, the biggest problem was with technology, not game design.

It was far from perfect, but it wasn't all bad. Many things have gotten way worse than they were in terms of story, variety, selection and quality of content.
Rant over.