I hope 7.0's has a way to skip most of the current story

[Shougun]

But it's also ridiculous to argue that they have to invent a fully new entry point to get around this issue.

It would complicate any future references to the existing plot, confuse the timeline, make New Game Plus into a bizarre contradiction – if you start with the new entry point then go back to review these quests, did they happen to you or not?

It is phenomenally simpler to just keep the story continuous and let people join it at an updated entry point (for free) without any story concessions for the skip.

One free story skip to 7.0 and one free job skip to level 90 with the purchase of future expansions is all that is necessary to get people into the new story arc.

It's also ridiculous to throw someone into the deep end without anything to help ground them. Also no new entry has to generate some weird blip into the timeline that causes huge issues. If you do a side quest in the game that theoretically happened before an event you've already done we don't come crashing to a halt, particularly if that side quest isn't hyper generative (as in it doesn't get referenced itself too much, or at all- even if itself references a lot).

You're purposefully putting in road bumps that do not need to exist for such an idea. You can create a new entry that references the world, but isn't needed to be referenced /by/ the world in the future. Many games that do have alternate starts, at the beginning of the game, don't reference them for this very reason- the difference is not much at all. Just like with people making up rules on how we can't have SMN egi, beast tribe differences, Reaper impossible, or whatever, when it comes to lore it seems people often tie themselves up extremely unnecessarily and SE themselves frequently disagrees with this too.

(Though they do obviously also agree with people that story is a core part of FFXIV, I wont cherry pick what they think lol).

If SE made an alternate start that was paramount to understanding future content, and it was either optional or it wasn't even achievable content for current players, then that would be a bit silly. But like, how about you don't do that? "Why do you have an alternate start then?". So you can help stick people to the landing.... It's just like new seasons of TV shows will often either do literal recaps before the start or will act like you forgot a bunch of stuff.

The much worse decision here, imo, is to do what you suggest and just toss people into the deep end. Such a low quality solution for people who are concerned about 350 hours of story, when I believe the best solution is to get them invest as best you can in as short a time as possible before you put them near the content they wanted for the purpose of the skip. You could always strip all story from an 'alternate start', and it's just a skippable part of the potion that gives you some cool non-story tutorials if people are very afraid of a new what is essentially just a side quest.

Having profound story impacts, as you suggest, is entirely optional issue that should obviously not be done.