So what is this about content becoming harder with the Savage cleared in 9 hours

[Bonoki]

I thought the HW savage difficulty killed statics rofl. There was also a LOT of jank back then, and I think the Ultimate difficulty was brought for people who wanted something more difficult a la HW?

It killed a lot of statics because there were no World/DC Visits. If people were bad on your server, you had to help them get better. Nowadays, if someone is bad you just replace them with someone better. In HW, the server first had actual meaning because of this. It doesn't anymore. A lot of the mechanics were also still new for its time. Direct Hit didn't exist, Accuracy wasted stats, TP was still a thing. If Gordias was repeated now, world racers would crush it. The world races in general were not a thing until Creator. FFlogs also wasn't a popular tool until Creator, the Balance discord was just getting started, optimization wasn't figured out for the longest time, and people struggled to play Physical Range at all. HW had so much going on that those circumstances could never be repeated. This was just a short list, that's not even everything that I could have listed.

[Morphiana]

It killed a lot of statics because there were no World/DC Visits. If people were bad on your server, you had to help them get better. Nowadays, if someone is bad you just replace them with someone better. In HW, the server first had actual meaning because of this. It doesn't anymore.

This is what your post says:

"If we make the raids as hard as HW again, the players who enjoy that difficulty and can clear it are so few they will need to search across every server to find one another to play together, and everyone else will just quit again because it is not accessible to them."

This solution admits that so few players like that level of difficulty on the average raid that you would need to search for them across the entire planet with data center travel to find them / play with them.

That does not solve the problem, it actually highlights how bad of an idea it is to revert back to that difficulty for savage raids upon an xpac's release. That solutions costs SE subs.