Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[Shurrikhan]

Dungeons became hallways because so many players didn't want to let others explore. I remember it was a good few months before I ever got places like Sastasha or Haukke fully explored. They could see it in their logs that no one was touching these areas, so there was no point in continuing that kind of design.

It isn't not as if dungeons are as narrowly designed as they are solely because they decided against room for exploration, of all things. There's a good dozen other constraints there between "a curated environment-delving combat experience that features both bosses and non-boss packs" and what we actually see.

Not bothering with unrewarding side-rooms is fine -- probably even for the best, so long as that design approach doesn't extend into other areas; it's the many, many other ways and degrees of stale design in XIV's dungeons that ticks people off.

That said, it's not necessarily the case that people didn't like X just because they didn't do X when the rewards for doing it just weren't there (especially, in a game that otherwise largely ensures breadth of reward). Siderooms are, by nature of having to backtrack, less efficient. They're also more tenuous, by nature of being less obvious and there possibly being members more pressed for time. If the devs wanted them actually done... they'd need to have given them decent enough rewards. The closest they ever got to that was the unique crafting ingredients, but one could mirror those stats with other recipes just a few levels higher.