Dear Community what even holds you in this game

[Commander_Justitia]

It's not talked about because that's not their intention with it. Obviously, this was their intention with FF11, but in FF14 there were a number of other reasons for it:

• AI was being developed for the NPCs for solo duties anyway. You could already see them working on it throughout Stormblood as the NPCs became really good at mechanics such as entering stack markers, spreading, etc. This culminated in a demonstration of the soon-to-be AI in Ghimlyt Dark.
• There were so many dungeons that people were waiting ages to get a queue pop. Not due to lack of people doing roulettes, but simply the sheer amount of dungeons was making any individual one harder to pop.
• A lot of FF players just play the single player FFs, and they want to lure them in by saying they can just do the story first, which is obviously a trap because along the way many of them will end up socializing and come out of their shell. That's how socializing is for a lot of people. They're afraid of it until they get pulled into a group - such as an FC, and a significant amount of FF14 players can relate to having been shy at first and then getting dragged into the social fabric of the game. It was a smart business strategy to do this when the technology was already being made for solo duties anyways.

Not sure what you describe as "AI". To me it is just scripts. We in gaming called any NPC simulating something like intelligence as AI in the past, but nowadays, it is not real AI like a model AI that can make their own decision based on the situation. A NPC will never go to a different spot to evade, it will always be the same in my experience.

And ehh too much handholding, it is a MMORPG, it is online with other players by design, it shouldn't cater so much to players playing solo the whole time.
Ofc it is smart when you expect less players in the future. But you get less players by having uninteresting same dungeon designs.

Mechanics have always been solvable by a computer in FFXIV. There are bots that clear ultimates. Most of the changes to dungeons were actually to make it intuitive/obvious to a new/returning player, whereas their old philosophy was to make it so you have to wait behind the purple line and discuss strategy

Yeah, they said it to make it more "intuitive for new players". I can't remember too many examples right now because I haven't played for months, but one example is copperbell mines - the slime boss mechanic is gone, it was such a simply mechanic, but "AI" anticipating where a tank brings the boss, is not reliable enough. So it got removed.
Same way the end boss used to have adds that break the wall to new adds to appear? Guess can't have that, too "dangerous" to new players. Yes, you went from using brain 10%, to mindlessly pressing buttons ignoring what ever happens, you cant die, you cant lose, just press your button like a bot.
One of my favorite bosses was the snowcloak 2nd boss. The snowball mechanic where you push it into the boss to instantly kill him more or less if executed well. Now that fight takes a few minutes, because it has become another mindless button smasher. NPCs don't know how to hit a snowball facing the boss at the right moment. They don't know if it is better to use a small or a big ball. That kind of decision making requires a human. Because SE didn't code for it. And instead of coding something so difficult, they just removed the mechanic.

Calling it more "intuitive/obvious" is really just an excuse for dumbing down dungeons for NPCs. As well as dumbing it down for casual players, who find out in a lvl80 mainstory end dungeon how to do aoe rotation, back then during shadowbringers expac...Instead of earlier.

You see the contradiction in what you said, right?

I noticed it when I wrote it, that it may sound that way. But still kept it. Because it doesn't contradict to me - I want the difficulty of the content and how we use skills to be higher, but I do not see a reason to make actual access to content difficult. Because that is not really a "difficulty" - it shouldn't exist once you have unlocked a duty. It is like an artificial resistance from doing it. Making players unsure if they are prepared enough, when they could just go and do it.