endwalker was an unacceptable unfished product

[Jeeqbit]

pushing a trial series story into the MSQ, resulting in less overall story and an MSQ story that a lot of folks don't like. That story takes off and wraps itself up in the post-expansion and as far as it seems now, has nothing to do with the next expansion coming up.

The void was something we were bound to have questions over after we saved the First. If we can save The First why not the Thirteenth? This question also came up in the quest that becomes available after beating all the Shadowbringers role quests and the Warring Triad. They were trying to clear up any remaining questions about the past, so they could move the game forwards.

The patches did build on Y'shtola's understanding of how to travel to other shards, which will most likely be crucial for a future expansion (probably 8.0, because they usually foreshadow the expansion after next in the patches).

They did reintroduce the gleaner who will be used more in the next part of the MSQ, set to release before 7.0.

it leaves me hopeless that we'll ever see all of Garlemald or its surrounding areas.

Graha mentioned Corvos quite a bit through Endwalker, so this may be foreshadowing their intention for us to go there. It is one of the areas of Ilsabard just beyond Thavnair. I don't think they would have Graha bring it up like he did if that wasn't their intention.

What form we will go there though, may not necessarily be in the MSQ. If they can't fit it into the MSQ, they have a tendency to make us go places in sidequests such as dungeons, Eureka, Bozja, Alliance Raids and now Variant Dungeons. But we will most likely go there one way or another.

I can't believe we got criterion instead of something similar to bozja or eureka; expecially because bozja felt like eureka but with huge quality of life changes.

I don't have as much problem with criterion, because criterion was requested by many wanting a Mythic+ system. I think people are more disappointed that we got Island Sanctuary instead of it.

I love how people were like "I hate fate grinding in the real world and running antitower 500x times" and they took it as "Oh just scrap the entire thing".

You did not have to FATE grind or farm Antitower. You could do almost all of the steps within Bozja itself, it's just that most people chose not to. That's on them. You could say "remove the choice so they have to do it in Bozja", but they tried that in Eureka and people complained saying they wanted to grind FATEs and Crystal Tower, so SE let them this time.

They get criticised whether they make you do new content or whether they make you farm old braindead content, so they tried a concept of "do whatever content you want as long as it drops tomestones" instead. It's just that we get the other tomestones from capping the weekly tomestones via Expert roulette, hunt trains and any other method we use to cap, so it doesn't feel like a grind anymore.

It sounds to me that the developers are spending all of the extra time to really work on the graphical update. It would make sense, because they have over 10 years of content to update

No, they will be gradually working on updating old expansion graphics through the 7.x patches. Just like they added Duty Support for expansions and then patches throughout 6.x, they will do that for graphics in 7.x, which means it has not yet all been done beside 7.0 and generic changes that affect all expansions such as shaders, settings and grass generation.