I think people lost track of the thread, so I'm gonna try and loop it back a bit, and then give my own feedback at the same time.

I see absolutely zero reason not to let duty support/trust have NPC resses and difficulties below normal mode. You could even just input a skip dungeon button too, does it really matter for MSQ? People play FF14 for whatever reasons they want to, let people play the way they want to play and do combat in whatever solo way they want.

But... there is an expected baseline for multiplayer to accommodate the largest amount of players, and that's the line the devs have currently chosen to draw, for better or worse. Tying raid progression and currency to expert dungeons is where a lot of this animosity comes in, and where a lot of pushback to making the game "braindead" mostly stems from. You feel you have to cap this currency because it's the only way to get this loot, so you have to do these dungeons, so it better be interesting, or it better be fast.

So to me, the answer is really simple. Let people do duty finder and trusts at any difficulty they want. Let people skip it solo if they really just want the story, or are here for other reasons. But gate expert queues behind completing duty finder/trust on normal with either NPC resses disabled or limited. If people are worried about botting and loot, either disable the loot, or better yet, make the loot "replicas" like we have for relics. This way even the single players can use the glams if they like them.

There's really no reason to not let duty support and trust have difficulty scaling. If you gate random queuing behind an expected difficulty, then you can maintain and upkeep a set difficulty for the larger multiplayer base as well. You get to make everyone happy, or at least, less likely to be upset with or by others.