I don't give a single frick about the msq. You do that content once and then it's over. The problem is that unless you're interested in raiding or similarly higher end content, there's absolutely nothing worth doing, and that SE seems like they're completely fine with that cadence.

Can you imagine if there were no savage/ultimate content until 7.2/7.3? You wouldn't hear the end of the of it. So why is that reality ok for casual content? Of course having an endgame is important, but in an mmo as large as xiv you have to take into account and cater to a variety of players, you can't just keep making content for one specific group. I think a perfect example of xiv getting this right was ARR relics. It was something you could work on as soon as you finished the msq, was regularly updated, and at various points the relic weapon was useful as a baseline to get into the current raid tier. It was basically the bare minimum expected of you to start the first coil, and it wasn't uncommon to see people with animus and novus relics taking on second coil

At some point, SE seems to have decided that having a meaningful casual progression path (or at this point, having casual content at all within the first year of an expansion) was something that they were no longer interested in doing and now choose frontload their expansions with raiding content and make it the end all be all of progressing your character until a year in where SE decides that they can find the time to address the rest (and the majority of, mind) of their playerbase and grace them with gift of whatever content they can be bothered to pull out of their arse

All the promises of content in dawntrail mean NOTHING if it isn't implemented in a timely manner. If we have to wait half an expansions lifespan for field operations, exploration dungeons or whatever else, that is completely unacceptable. SE's priorities NEED to change. My greatest fear is that after two expansions of people begging for SE to give them something to do outside of raiding, SE finally delivers in 7.2 or 7.3 and people get it and go like "Look! Look! the content is here! SE listened to us! The game is good! I told you it would be!" and then SE sees that reaction and goes "we did a good job" and learns nothing. Then 8.0 comes around and the cycle repeats again with SE self assured that they can just have nothing for their playerbase to do for an entire year and it's completely fine for them to do so. Sadly, and I really do mean it makes me fricken sad, I see this as the most likely outcome