I am not sure what the correct path to take is, but eventually they will have to make an alternate starting point. It is unfeasible now to expect new players to want to wade through 300+ hours of story to get to endgame. Imagine it in 4 more years when it is 500 or 600+ hours of story. It will reach a breaking point where it will be extremely hard to convince new players to try FFXIV, and will likely hurt SE's numbers.

I think it would just be worth to let people skip ARR - EW and hop straight into 7.0 at the appropriate level if they would like. Make it once per account so story and job skips aren't useless (SE would never remove these, so best compromise I can think of). Sure - it would drop unskilled brand new players into dungeons that might be far above beginner skill-level... but that's just normal DF anyways. Could even make a tutorial they have to play first so they understand the basics of the game such as tank stance/common damage markers/limit breaks/etc.