I've spent about 50 hours in OC without touching FT because I've been enjoying leveling the different jobs, hunting for carrots, farming for glams, testing out dope phantom job/base job combos, and the general sense of open world community it provides. Honestly don't even care about forked tower. The mount it gives is kinda ugly and I could just trade a few carrots worth of gil for the rewards if I really cared.
I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.