why are people so resistant to constructive criticism about the game?

[Shougun]

This is where the fact that this is an MMO comes into play. MMOs are supposed to have a wide variety of content in order to attract a wide variety of players. Story might be FF's thing, and plenty of people love them for it, but in an MMO that is simply one part of the whole product. I've not run across another MMO that forces 100% of the MSQ on you if you want to do relevant content. Even SE's only other MMO, XI, didn't do that.

However, your comment does touch on another point. The 'end-game' of XIV is really quite bare. The bulk of the 'active' content revolves around your weekly raid clearing and then getting your weekly tomes. Yes, there are some other activities you can do, but most of it's not going to take up much of your time at all.

I think XIV is rather content in the box it has placed itself, and regardless of what we want, it's probably going to continue down the same path. So ultimately it's up to each of us to decide if it's something we can still enjoy or if it's time to branch out.

Which is while I personally enjoyed the story, and I know others have, I still have suggested that if they carry on much longer that they create a new, optional, start to the game that can, as best as possible with limited amount of time, create a grounded and accelerated start into the game (I also think it could be an opportunity to refine a start, since I think it can be a bit meandering and they could polish the stages of excitement to make the start hook sink deeper).

If we get into 8.0 and everything keeps stacking as it has so far then its going to be like 75 (2.0) + 50 (3.0) + 50 (4.0) + 50 (5.0) + 50 (6.0) + 50 (7.0) = ~325 + / - 100 hours of mostly just story walls (assuming you don't skip every cutscene and do a few quests here and there or try different jobs occasionally, I'm sure someone 'speed running' the MSQ and knew the game already could cut that down by 70%). Three hundred twenty five hours. I didn't spend half that much time to complete every quest and nearly all the sets and potions in Witcher 3. On the bright side if you were looking for an insanely long game, boy have I found you a treat lol. Even if you make that more accurate to our situation and say time to get to 6.0 (our next expansion), it's still roughly 225 hours (assuming a new person playing pretty standard, occasionally getting side tracked by other quests, and who isn't being guided / dragged at warp speed - not some FFXIV vet replaying the story again and beelining to everything they need while skipping most dialog).

I think this number is still a good thing for some people, as a player that's played it mostly as it's been released it's been great, but it is also can be a bad thing for others for varying reasons. Just a very daunting fact for example, like telling someone they need to invest $100 into a game upfront would turn away a lot of people even if it was absolutely worth it (not saying FFXIV is $100, I'm giving a comparison of daunting). Also some people, I'd say most, that come past a game's start come either due to friends, burned from their current MMO, or hype from an expansion pre and post release. If I was hearing about how amazing Shadowlands (WoW) was but then told I had to invest 325 hours of content that I wasn't sure would be as good as shadowlands just before I could even try it, I might sincerely think "yeah, no thanks". Especially if I heard combat from x to y is a bit boring by y to z is not, then you tell me I have to spend many many hours in the x to y area. Just a few of many many examples that could be made about someone coming in late and then being fronted with nearly 100%'ing witcher 3 twice just to catch up lol.

Alternatively it's also why when Yoshida has, multiple times, talked about another dalamud, and all the other side data- number of hours requiring significant time to catch up, this being an issue if people started to play specifically because of expansion hype, getting close to the distance from FFXI to FFXIV arr's release, number of jobs getting close to matching to FFXI, technological hurdles being probably easier, or at least less scary, to fix starting new (like glamour log), getting all those legacy players to pay full amount again (that's some nice $$), approaching the end of the MSQ we've been on for so long (doesn't mean there can't be more after that, of course- just this zodiark / hyd is coming to close), that I really do think it's high potential for something big coming, either another ARR like change expansion or a new mmo (and by coming I'm thinking like 1-3 years from now).