FFXIV is too simplistic and bland

[Shurrikhan]

There was a time when in FFXI, 5k exp/hour is considered awesome. It takes months to finish level up one class/job to level cap.
There was a time when relics cost an obscene amount of playtime to complete. Mine took 2, almost 3 years.
There was a time when people spend 3 hours camping a single HNM...for a ~5% drop rate.
There was a time when drop rates are so pitiful, people wait in line for months, even years to get their turn for an item. People come up with distribution systems that require player participation (i.e. time). If you don't put in the "massive" amounts of playtime, expect to wait a long time too.
There was a time when you need a party to level up. So some people spend ages waiting...(in Jeuno)...for parties...and no there was no party finder.
There was a time when running a dungeon needs you to walk up to the actual entrance of a dungeon.
There was a time when HNMs are locked behind zone barriers, in zones filled with lethal mobs. Just getting a group to the HNM takes an hour or two.

And did the existence of those pieces of content and their limitations prevent people with less than two hours at a time to spend from enjoying the game on the whole?

Did never hitting cutting edge raiding prevent your typical player from enjoying the game?

Is a journey so impossible to enjoy satisfactorily so long as its ending isn't easily accessible to everyone?

For my own part, I'd rather that the processes were enjoyable than that I am necessarily able to complete everything there is on offer while working a full-time job.

And the funny thing is that, for the most part, having an enjoyable process and a sense of accessibility aren't even mutually exclusive, so long as you don't mistake enjoyability for a matter of percents and quotas. That Ultimate exists outside my reach (or, for that matter, desires) doesn't devalue what is in my reach except by consequence of development time spent -- and there's no way my range of desired content is going to take advantage of the expertise of those battle designers or of reused assets to the extent that Ultimate would, so I'm not about to begrudge them something that, even given the relatively small population of those interested in Ultimate vicarious, or the even smaller population of those actually progressing through it, is ultimately still efficient.