The story is great, but it blatantly gets in the way of the rest of the game

[Tychonius]

The new player experience in this game is made genuinely worse by the fact that you have to go through this bizarre hazing ritual of reenacting nine years of live service with all the waits between expansions through the story missions before you're allowed to actually play the game in its present state. Let's say you're getting into FF14 in 2022 and you're looking through the class list going "Huh, Sage looks cool!", but then it turns out you're actually several months of playing regularly away from being able to even touch the class. It's not a satisfying experience to basically be forced to play the game as it was years ago for hundreds of hours to be able to access things that may have been a selling point for you in the here and now.

If someone has played for years and has enjoyed the story at the pace at which it was being told I understand why they are fond of it. But why does a newer player need to be locked out of all expansion content until they have caught up on all of it? The newer player doesn't get several years to finish those missions at their leisure with long periods of time in between for exploring other aspects of the game. If they want to catch up they just have to sit down and power through them. It turns the story into an obnoxious gatekeeper stopping you from rolling the classes you find interesting, getting into difficult dungeons, joining high level activities or even just taking your time with the low level stuff if you don't want to be endlessly delayed instead of it being a fun aspect of the game you play when you feel like doing story missions.

It is a valid reply, and it applies to every hobby in life. Don't enjoy something for one reason or another? Stop doing it, otherwise you're just wasting your time and making yourself frustrated for no reason. What isn't valid is expecting the foundations of something to change because you don't like it. We aren't talking QoL or class changes, etc, we're talking "tear out the skeleton of the game and put something else in." That is absurdly arrogant and delusional, and it always baffles me that people think this is a reasonable approach for the devs to take.

Telling people to leave the game if they think the main quest shouldn't insist on itself so hard is absolutely not valid. It's completely hypocritical and here is why:

You're not jumping on the devs for putting PvP arenas or raids in the game. You're not complaining that there are levels and gear and materia harvesting and an auction house and a retainer system and player housing and costuming.

There are tens of thousands of work hours being poured into creating parts of the game that have nothing to do with the story. That exist entirely to appeal to people who enjoy other aspects of the MMORPG genre.

Why is it that a player should be considered wrong for wanting to enjoy those parts of the game freely, but the devs are somehow not wrong for creating those parts of the game with the clear intent that someone would enjoy them?