Old content has become so easy that it is no longer fun

[Melorie]

I'd much rather the game be too easy, but easy enough that people can do almost all of the content any time they want, rather freely, than have half the content be locked off behind walls of "well if I don't have a group of personal friends who want to run every every piece of content, I guess I'll just never be able to do anything but the most recent stuff." like what happens to so many other online games that lock people in to running things as they were.

The point is that FFXIV was always like you're describing. Even with content on-release. You never had to get a pre-made to do a dungeon or a normal mode trial or a 24-man, unless you wanted to. Much like you don't have to do this with Endwalker. Making things easier isn't a question of making things accessible because they already are, always have been. And there is a huge difference between something easy and something extremely boring, that barely makes you pay attention to your screen - which is what will happen with a huge chunk of the content of the game if they don't pay attention how syncing/power creep works.

I'll sound like a broken-record but again, OP didn't even ask to make things harder... They asked to not make content that is already easy and already made to be accessible even easier.