More Variant Dungeons in 7.0? REALLY?

[Renathras]

Let's be honest with ourselves here: Reward Structure is trash in Variants. Either they beef it up and give us more stuff that's worth doing it for aside from Materia and an outfit/mount, or it's going to more dead content.

Honestly, it wouldn't even have to be huge things, just things people want. For example, what if you could buy the Mandarium Ores with those currencies (at a slightly faster rate than if you were spamming dungeons for the tomes)? This would give people a reason to do them, like how Eureka had PotD/HoH drops for the relics (just no more random low % chance here, you'd just buy them with the potsherds). That would already give people a reason to run them if they want to work on more Relics/quicker Relics.

It would also make the Relic grind a bit more interesting since you'd have these additional avenues you could use. It's so odd that this new content for the expansion has NO tie to the Relic weapons. Even just having the Mandarium Ores (updated with each Relic step to include the latest one as well) in their shops would make it worth doing. At this point in the game, no one needs more Materia. I've done enough Hunt Trains I have close to 2000 of the grade 9 and 1500 of the grade 10 turn-in items, and another roughly 50-100 of each Materia between Expert chest/random drops and having bought a bunch in the past with the cracked clusters. Even people who don't do Hunts often, you have PvP Wolf Marks as another source and extracting from all the gear you've worn over the course of the expansion.

I know Materia is their go-to "extra thing people can buy", but at this point, I can't imagine anyone that actually melds their gear ISN'T already drowning in Materia (or has the money to buy what they need from the MB anyway), certainly not that they'd run C&Vs over and over to buy more.

EDIT:

Varients are fine, although I wouldn't be opposed to them dropping gear, even if it's run of the mill Dungeon green loot, if just for Glamour Purposes.

Criterion and Savage should absolutely drop Raid Equivalent gear. Maybe not BiS but considering their difficulty would 5 ilvl below the current raid gear drops but with 5 Materia Slots guaranteed be too much for the Savage drop to have?

So the revival of the ancient concept (Vanilla/BC WoW era ancient, so from the 00s) of "Dungeon Sets"?

Might be worth looking into, but raiders tend to get ants in their pants about anyone else having gear at all close to theirs, and only grudgingly accept it at the very end of an expansion after all content has been released and cleared in the form of the final Relic weapon update, which had to be lower ilevel than their Savage weapons all the way until then otherwise they'd have been even more upset.