I don't care about expanded character customization.

The graphics look astounding and don't really need to be better. The only thing that doesn't look realistic is characters and I think that's on purpose both for customization reasons and to help with rendering large amounts of characters.

The reason people think that things like GShade "fix" the game is because they don't understand that it is this way on purpose. The graphics are based on a concept of reflecting light to produce color and what these filters do is disable that and make it work like other games. According to development sections of live letters where we see how areas get constructed, the developers spend a lot of time choosing colors carefully for areas and items based on how the light reflects in different settings and different weathers.

To suddenly change the way lighting works would mean a big change to the development processes and the considerations that go into it and it might mean needing to revisit everything that has already been done to make sure the colors work. In my opinion, things like GShade mess it up. When I watch videos of people who use it, some things are not experienced the way they should be or don't look right compared to how I experience it with my default graphics. There are things that look great to me but in those videos look extremely bright or incorrectly colored to the point of ruining their story experience.

For the short term, 6.1 needs to be jam-packed with content. If there is only alliance raid, ultimate, new extreme, and new pvp mode, I can see it not lasting much. They need to add either island sanctuary, a new deep dungeon, or the first step of the relic in that patch. Maybe they can even add something unexpected, like blitzball!
What they do now is spread the content of a major patch over sub-patches, such as 6.1, 6.15, 6.18. This is a good thing because too much content at once is overwhelming and forces you to choose which one to "be one of the first" to do. Imagine having a choice between doing bozja day 1, and doing savage day 1. That sort of decision isn't fun and having it spread out helps.