I can understand the frustration, but at the same time, I understand why they do it (even aside from the obvious answer of "to keep people subbed"). Just like you want the gear to look cool, there's people who want to always have the most bleeding-edge gear, and if you take the weekly limits off of it and just say "here you go, you can grind all the gear out instantly, but it'll take 80 hours", there's a good chunk of people who'll attempt to burn through it as fast as possible, and not only will they have no reason to sub afterwards, they will have hated every hour of that grind, and probably the game as a result.

You can say "well that's their own decision, too bad", but this isn't something unique to FF14 or MMO players in general. There's a quote from the designers of the Civilization games that's essentially "given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game for themselves, so it's the job of the designer to save them from themselves", which rings true in a lot of senses across a bunch of categories. It can refer to cheap strategies that obsolete core parts of the game (which players will gravitate to, especially for challenges), but also to things like MMOs where if you give the player the option to do something they'll really hate to do for a reward, some people will do it and like the game less because of it. So pacing structures exist to keep those kinds of people from willingly shooting themselves in the foot + burning out on the game

As a decently high-end raider, I enjoy that after week 1, I can just log on for a few hours each week, do my stuff, and then take a break for another week and not feel like I'm falling behind. Obviously you're talking about normal modes vs savage, but it's not much different there.