It’s valid if your goal of doing a hard content is just for fun.
It’s also valid if your goal of doing a hard content is for the loot.
There’s no need to invalidate how other people’s thoughts

However, no one can deny the fact that the reward of the criterion dungeon is not motivating to most players. A glamour earring that is barely noticeable, a banner, a mount that needs 100 silver coins which can also be bought from MB. To work for that you would need to spend hours of progging to clear the content, which is on the equivalent level of progging to clear a savage fight. The fact you only get to exchange a single piece of grade 10 materia from doing the savage version is the most insulting thing ever.

When you have a bad reward system, it turns down majority of player’s desire to do it, especially you have to spend hours and hours. Before the patch dropped, I have reached out at least 10 friends with different raiding backgrounds to do the criterion together (in different groups ofc). On the patch day, 2 people dropped immediately because they thought the loot was garbage. 3 days later, half of them dropped because they lost the interest. 1 week later, none of them wanted to continue any more.

Then I looked up on pf, there’s usually only 2 or 3 groups looking for members on Crystal, and usually most of them are on the first boss prog. Then the occasional 1 group which stated 3rd boss prog usually turns into 2nd boss prog. It is quite miserable because I do enjoy the fight designs of all 3 bosses, but it’s incredibly difficult to find people who are on the same prog as you to join.