Personally, I think SE made a game that players want and we hate ourselves for liking it.

Some people noted that people stand around Limsa and just pop in/out of duties. Should we go back to having to travel to the duty entrance instead? No more flying mounts. Limited teleports; maybe just 1 for all expansions and then you have to take a ship or some other timesink to get where you want to go?

How about queueing for duties themselves? What we have now is convenient. Click a button and SE's servers do the job for you of matching you up with other players to complete it. The people we are matched with might as well be NPCs at times. 99% of instances go like this:

- enter instance
- people type / o/ o7 or nothing at all
- clear it
- people type gg or nothing at all

Would we prefer to make our own groups for all content, not just high-end content? Stand around Lima shouting "LF 2 DPS and heals for expert... meet me at the entrance to the dungeon!"

In nearly every MMO I played prior to FFXIV, forming a group to gain experience was a chore. Sometimes you might only have 1 hour which means you might as well not login. It takes that long to get people together and get to where you have to go. However, this chore was also community forming. The people on your friends' list were invaluable. These were people that didn't let you down. It was a big deal to make friend with people, since they'd come to you first for a group.

It was like skipping the queue.

But we got what we have now because this is what players wanted. And in many ways it works. I don't have 3-6 hours anymore to sit down at my computer and play a game. With just 20 minutes, I can login, run a dungeon and logout. In other games, it would take 20 minutes just to get to the dungeon, not counting getting a party together and actually running it.