Quote Originally Posted by Hyrist View Post
Yes. However what's not be mentioned here is that that vein of complaint can usually be traced to the same people who complained back then.
I think you both overestimate player retention and underestimate just how dull the pull-to-gate-AoE-pull-to-gate-AoE-boss-pull-to-gate-AoE-pull-to-gate-AoE-boss-pull-to-gate-AoE-pull-to-gate-AoE-boss hallway sprint simulator can be even to new players...

And also since then, content like Deep Dungeon, Heaven on High, Eureka, and Bozja have been implemented to attempt to accommodate more exploration based content.
To the same sense that providing powdered eggs attempts to accommodate a 5-star breakfast, perhaps. But note also that a lack of "exploration" alone, or even primarily, does not come anywhere close to encapsulating the complaints towards dungeons being a shallow and/or stale experience.

In the last two, the additions of Content-Based Raids existed that were very much the in-depth dungeons that were asked of, but of a larger personal scale.
And gated behind long grinds that those who've complained about the unvaried dungeon experience are in many cases the very players most likely to find mind-numbing.

There will always be those who desire something that's not there.
Yes, until it's there. There was a desire for PvP. Your blasé philosophizing would have been just as appropriate were anyone in 2.0 to have asked for PvP to be added.

This is a lingering desire, not a system-wide problem.
Yes, that's how unfulfilled desires work. And, like most unfulfilled desires, there are system-level intersections. The most notable here is flat daily bonuses on roulettes which incentivize players towards the shortest possible dungeon path for max efficiency; even if the rewards for doing each optional element in a dungeon were slightly overtuned, as long as you're getting a flat daily bonus equal or nearly equal to the whole base run's worth of reward, that balance of rewards within the dungeon itself will just be overpowered by the daily bonuses, causing conflicts between those doing the roulette or any content on it for the first time that day and those who are going for a second or further time.

As the Devils Advocate here: "Don't go wasting my time with needlessly complex dungeons in my roulettes."
Then, a further counterpoint: Why would you limit fun to what is convenient to a singular, barebone 8-year-old reward loop and its enticements, rather than designing your reward loops and enticements around what is fun?

We have plenty of existing options for anyone looking to progress now.
While I agree with your larger message that immediately follows (regarding to what extent designers stretching their skills would be harmless), a brief note:

We have a handful of content types; the problem is when the individual pieces of content within any given type feels largely interchangeable, or only a small portion is included in the enticed content flow (i.e., in the game's efficient reward loops). And here, too, the point in case is dungeons.

As far as the difficulty complaint? Eh, that's always adjustable and nobody here has any real say so on how that plays out so I'm not concerned with that conversation.
We can't both have "adjustable" difficulty and have no "real say" on how that plays out. If the "adjustable" difficulty you speak of is purely from the devs end -- to nerf (historically, always) or reinvigorate (historically, never) content as they see fit -- that still rings false, so long as the requests are made for a reduction in difficulty (see Keep, Pharos, Steps, etc.).