FF14 is not made for hardcore players.

[JanVanding]

Yep. Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about realizes that the problem hasn't been player elitism. It's...basically everything else, most of which have nothing to do with the players themselves at all.

Game became like a full time job in Legion and continued on that same path.

You didn't grind your arbitrary "special content" every single day? You don't get to raid

Picked the unfavoured class as your main class? Tough luck, it's too late to switch and catch up now unless you can play 8 hours a day every day. To such a degree Mr Hazzikozas straight said to every Warlock players face "Maybe play another class"

Add in that they went out of their way to outright kill off all enjoyment and reward from PvP, made lower scale content completely unrewarding and high end content gated behind the insane grinds, you could see who they were making the game for and who they were not.

WoW already lost most of its player base before the scandals and shadowlands came out, many hopped off at WoD/Legion or through BFA

They killed the game themselves by catering it entirely to the smallest section of the player base, why?

Because Ion Hazzikokzas is that type of player, people forget he was also a player himself, so he can only think in the dimension of "What would I enjoy" and that has shown time and time again.

This is where he differs from Yoshidas philosophy, where Yoshida develops the game with other players' mindsets in mind, not just his own.

To Add: While You're probably thinking "WoW always kind of had that"

In a way, yes you did always have to do a series of challenging and sometimes grindy content in order to unlock raids, Black Temple Attunement being one I particularly remember as having us jump through a series of hoops.

The difference was? Once you got it? Done, you never had to do it again. Even AQ as annoying and dull as the world event was, once it was done, that was it, no more grind. Modern WoW threw the philosophy of hard entry away which, quite a lot actually enjoyed as it felt rewarding, to add the stupid forever grind with easier entry to a much dumbed down version of the raid.