Cosmic Exploration is CASUAL content with a pinch of midcore

[Valence]

Something can be hardcore for no other reason than suddenly throwing a massive difficulty spike at you because somebody on the dev team thought it would be funny.

Hilarious example just tonight; I assumed Sightseeing Logs to be casual content until some buffoon decided I needed to do jumping puzzles for some of the Stormblood ones, thus rendering 100% completion impossible unless I'm good enough. Of which I am not, so I guess I'm done with this piece of content (because why even bother collecting them from Shadowbringers and beyond if it'll never be completely done?)

I've likewise given up progressing the Blue Mage story because if I can't clear 29, so I have zero hope of clearing 30 and so on. I've also got a permanent quest marker out in the Ruby Sea because I can't even clear floor 20 of Palace of the Dead, much less 50.

Hell, I'd go so far as to say the majority of FF14 is in fact midcore content with hardcore offerings with casual content being almost non-existent because even something as benign as fishing has Big Fish and the like, or how Triple Triad literally sends you up against cheaters. There is a shockingly large amount of content that can't ACTUALLY be sleepwalked contrary to popular belief, and it's harder than some people want to admit just because it was a breeze for them personally. I doubt I could even do proper crafting that didn't involve Trained Eye, so yeah, expert recipes might as well be mid/hardcore too for all the difference it would make in my ability to do them.

Again, it would be so so much easier if people here would just admit they're actually just super good at the game instead of saying everything is easy because the false hope of what casuals can actually accomplish in this game gets tiresome after awhile because this game keeps getting harder but I'm not getting any better.

I don't disagree with your sightseeing log, although the platformer part of it was there in ARR with a couple of them already, and they were tied to annoying weather/time windows. They got rid of most of it in HW only to reintroduce and try out the kugane inn and tower in SB because they had that new idea of doing jump puzzles, so sightseeing seemed like the right place for it. Counterpoint though, it was merely 3-4 logs in SB, so is that a problem that some people could get a little challenge as well or should the entirety of the content have been dedicated exclusively to you there? Genuine question: do you need them ALL done for something? Is there a specific reward attached to this?

Anyway, that's beyond the point, where is the difficulty spike here exactly? It's baseline crafting recipes, and A-Ranks are either hard or expert recipes, which has been a requirement for every DoH relic since their introduction in ShB. Where is that wrench that came out of nowhere supposedly there? Or are you just unhappy that the relics require expert recipes? Because that argument, I can hear. It's valid. Doesn't mean that I agree or disagree with it, but it's valid (and has some have said above, you can bypass A ranks for your relics anyway apparently). But let's not pretend a second that it's something that came out of the blue?

The fundamental issue I take is that you try to conflate the whole game as "midcore" or "hardcore" as soon as a small part of it is above the baseline (yes big fishing is a small part of fishing, like A-ranks are a small part of cosmic). This sounds genuinely disingenuous to me. Aren't people allowed to have more challenging things to do as well? 90% of this new content is literally casual, yet you're trying to shoehorn it under a hardcore umbrella? All your examples, I feel like that you're taking offense that a part of the content is targeted at a higher difficulty than the majority of the baseline. Should we also delete extreme trials and whatnot because they suddenly render ALL pve "hardcore"?

But it also doesn't really counter what I said that the content in this game is harder than people want to admit just because it was a snap for them personally

You're trying to shift the subject on what the OP wasn't about. You're perfectly within your right to find the current content hard for you. You're perfectly within your right to find baseline crafting hard for you (because again, 90% of cosmic is baseline crafting).
But saying this is hardcore? Just no.

I fail to see how a AFK Clicker game is any content at all though

Truly riveting content right?
But the point is, can't do more casual than this...