The difficulty curve in the game has... problems...

[Colt47]

I'd consider EX and first savage floors to be the remaining bridge.
Get better at ex, move onto trying floor 1, get better at it for how there's still a difficulty gap between the two then move on to the rest of the floors.

The issue is what does one consider completion? Midcore content is a fight or a series of fights that can be completed by players who have yet to ramp themselves up to harder content, and usually allows for players to gain the same rewards as provided by the hardcore content at a slower rate. Savage is not a set of single fights, it is an entire series of fights and has to be measured by the hardest fight in the series, which is p3s/p4s under the current tier. Not sure if you read anything back in the earlier posts that I made, but I'll repeat one of the points made for the sake of convenience: The shadowbringers job changes brought up the skill floor and EX content is no longer midcore content. It sort of became it's own thing and a lot of people just skip strait to savage now due to the changes. Unreal is even more-so in it's own kind of world as there's a lot of players who have never once touched it outside of maybe a few times when it got released.

Problem is that people should not be taking longer than 2 months to clear a savage tier. They release so much other content in the game and people are bleeding themselves dry having to break through content that clearly was not for them, or because they had the misfortune of not being able to get in a group that has the coordination and time needed to clear the content at decent rate. That and due to the rewards, the savage tier looks like a continuation of the normal 8 man raids when it is not supposed to be.