I need to vent about FFXIV as a whole at this point.

[Avoidy]

Agreed on a lot of things. In fact, anything in this post that I don't touch on in regards to your OP is probably because I agree with it.

Saying it was just casual feedback responsible for making this game boring is mistaken. Fun jobs like ast got their quirky rng/card elements streamlined because there were raiders whining about how the job was too inconsistent/random for their scripted tastes and saying stuff like "I only fish for the balance anyway, so why bother having these other cards here." That job, along with others, has been sanded down nonstop to fit the standardized palette of an fflogs connoisseur. I also distinctly remember (though they'll all deny it now) people bitching in here about how annoying it was to have some cds be on 90/180 seconds while most of them were on 120. A casual player would not care about/notice this sort of thing. But alas, in EW it was changed to further standardize this game, and now we're sat here pissed about how boring it feels to play. Meanwhile, every expac has a crappy .1 that's just seen as a given at this point, because the devs love prioritizing their hardcore base first and foremost, which means frontloading their expansion with hardcore raidslop as quickly as possible while their casual base sits around doing nothing for nearly a year post-msq.

But despite all this, people will seriously come here with a straight face and act like casual players are eating good in this game, lmao. Is some dummy casual content dumbed down to appeal to casual players? Sure. Was Endwalker's normal content basically a testament to the dumbing down policy? Absolutely. But I'd argue that despite that, they're not even really pleasing casuals anymore. Look at the current state of the game. What can a casual player log in and do? Expert roulette? A five minute beast tribe? Maybe maps? It's pathetic. Meanwhile, hardcore players and raiders at least have savage, ultimate, ex, unreal, and ofc the upcoming chaotic. And yet, even those players do not seem happy because savage content has this inane "once a week" soft-cd on it, ultimate appeals to like 5% of the population, unreal is literally just byakko -- an ex that was easy on release, now with more abilities at your disposal -- and EX stuff is legit just 1 fight that there's barely a reason to repeat unless you want the glam or an ugly mount i guess.

It's just important to retain perspective, I guess. I'm relatively casual? At best I'll do an EX with friends. But I've watched several of my favorite jobs get sanded down to fit a 120s mold that only raiders seem to prattle on about. And I'm about to cancel my recurring sub because there isn't jack shit for me to do in this game. As someone who's relatively casual, I don't recall asking for any of this and from my perspective it seems like the game is hyper focused on pleasing hardcore types who log in once a week, bang out their weeklies, and treat the game like a second job with all their metrics and constant bitching about minor percentage point differences. Because at least they get something to do. At least their content seems like love was applied to it. And when they submit job feedback, they usually have obnoxious streamers being really loud about it until they get some semblance of what they want, even if it comes at the cost of the job's uniqueness. As I write this, I'm remembering how quickly they changed PLD last expac because it fell behind in savage. IIRC they changed how the job functioned and made it more bursty like other jobs so it'd be in line with the rest of the tanks.

And lol, now I see people complaining about modders like it's their fault the designers are lazy and the game is dull atm. At least when ERPers and modders have their fun, they're not on here actively calling for the watering down of all the stuff I used to like. ERPers didn't ask for every AST card to be The Balance. ERPers didn't whine about a card based job having randomness associated with it. ERPers didn't put every job on a 2 minute cycle. These guys just textbang in a basement somewhere. The devs are lazy and want everything standardized so they can have an easier time designing fights. That's basically it.

That said, yeah, more openworld stuff would be a banger. More stuff to do that isn't just raiding would be great as well, because honestly this game's approach to "difficult raids" is awful; redoing the same scripted encounter with the same scripted jobs until everyone's in sync is boring as hell and there's a reason so many people don't want to do it. Inching towards incremental improvements while monitoring spreadsheet data and obsessing over parsed data is a blast for some, I'm sure, but holy crap is it a mistake to make that the bulk of your postgame content for a year+ and then wonder why people are quitting like crazy.