The white knight brigade is out in full force again. Right there with you OP, the game desperately needs long term content and this is why Endwalker feels like the most barren expansion yet. I felt the decline in Shadowbringers already but this is on a whole another level. Now we finally get longer form content with EO but what's even the point of doing it when you can just get a better weapon by farming some tomes? It's like we're in oppositeland where the relic is handed to you for nothing and you have to actually put in effort to get a weapon from deep dungeon that's inferior in every way. How do they manage to release content in the same damn patch that completely cannibalize one another... That just completely deflates my interest in the content alltogether. No one is running content just for the sake of doing it, that's why no one is doing variant/criterion anymore. This expansion has been so barren in content that I feel you'd had to have been actively avoiding leveling to not have all combat jobs at 90 by now, so there goes the leveling aspect too.

I don't even know what to think of the "relic" of this expansion. I mean as someone who plays multiple jobs it's nice that they're easy to get but farming tomes is not interesting, that's what everyone's been doing since the game came out. It just feels lazy and uninspired, like they're not even pretending to try anymore. No one in their right mind can even call this relic content, in fact this is the most pitiful noncontent for a relic we've seen yet.

I don't know if it's XVI soaking up all the time and resources or what but I haven't seen a decline this sharp in content in the game yet and I've been playing since the phase 3 of the ARR beta, not to say we haven't had issues with the subject in the past, many many a time.