Concern for onboarding experience of new players

[NegativeS]

As someone relatively new who remembers their onboarding experience quite well:

I understand the game is a casual experience by heart that seeks to give players as much freedom and respect their time as possible, but it has become increasingly evident that the people I know, new to the game, feel as though they are going through a long and arduous trial by boredom, as far as difficulty, to get to something a bit more challenging.

I definitely felt like that to begin with, but it ended pretty much the moment I hit level 10. Which... isn't that far into the game. Probably just a personal experience, though.

Something that I can tell you is that, people will inevitably think less of the game if you talk it up to them and try to hold their hand through the early parts. I tried, failed, and likely alienated several people trying to do this in the past.

Making a game just challenging enough, but not too hard, is important, or they will get bored. However, the current case is that there is no challenge at all. The bosses of the MSQ are trivial up until... memory forgets. There has not been a challenging fight since the end of ShB, and much less since the start of Endwalker. We are not scaling correctly with the bosses, and the new players are suffering for it. Please address early game boss, dungeon and trial balance. Players should be punished early for mistakes so that they are easier to join into harder things and become parts of the community, valuable to it.

I agree that a lot of the early stuff is easy, but it's kind of par for the course when it comes to MMOs at this point. I remember playing Deadmines, the first WoW dungeon, and was being pulled wall-to-wall by people at the minimum level allowed to run the dungeon.
Also keep in mind that new stuff is also being experienced by people going in blind, often without friends holding their hand, and so they won't have something on farm like a level 90 getting synced down would.

A concerning amount of people I know simply will not suffer through the MSQ because the combat is not challenging even a little. They are interested in the story, yet they are forced to walk around like drones with no promise for difficulty. This is not fun in the slightest. This is especially exacerbated in ARR, but it doesn't end anywhere else.

If you think the MSQ is boring or something you have to 'suffer' through, you are playing the wrooooooooooong MMO. I can name a few that are less story heavy if you want, or just shell out for a story skip.
When I was new I loved the ARR MSQ, and only ever felt like it started grinding during the Crystal Tower and in a few tedious EW quests. Which is like, 1, maybe 2% of the MSQ?

Edit: Difficulty in lower level content is especially evident when syncing down. The enemies in the game practically fall over and die. A semblance of challenge is necessary to preserve engagement, please. I don't even do my roulettes because I'll get something trivial myself, and its just boring.

Combat in the early game desperately needs a touch-up, as all the cool abilities have been backloaded into the late game. I know PLD suffers from this probably the most.