I have to agree that this welcome back was a complete and utter sham, I invited 3 friends back, and all of them have the same opinion "Yep that confirms it, XIV is still as shit as it was when I last played".

Lets go through the struggles

Servers being Locked
Great, so they cant move to my server. They didnt have pre-50s, only 1 did, but he was merged to the Auto Server which I wasnt on, and he couldnt reroll on my server because its locked. So we was all forced to reroll as level 1 on another server.

Crappy low level content
There is just absolute nothing to do, they left doing leves, they come back "What can we do", "We can do leves!" /logout, but it is the only real way to level outside being PL'd, and because we rerolled on a new server, know no one, we cant be PL'd, so back to the old fashion crappy ways. We only have 10 days and we have to churn out this rubbish.

Experience once in a life time Umbral Event
I am sorry, this is the same shit that was here last patch, its not special for these 10 days, nothing good happened, could youtube it and experience it. But what is worse is the fact that this is level 50 content that requires a damn party to even do, unless there are other people there. But because its the same old crap content everyones done it. So lol@Experience it, very few would be able to, under the right strict conditions. So they didnt get to do anything of that. They just looked at them and laughed because they dont attack unless you "sign up" lol. Threatening...

More levelling! to 25 we go!
So what can we do at 25, Toto-Rak, oh joy. Thats fun /cry, I had already burned myself on Toto-Rak as its the only decent way to get Seals, so I was not looking forward to this. Same for one of my other friends who had a pre50 in that he just did it lots of times when it was released. We didnt last long there.

What next? What can SE suggest?
One of their welcome back messages go "Come experience the Inn"............ LOL "step in" "woo experienced!" are you kidding me?... Maybe we can go to that level 15 dungeon or w/e, *30 mins later* ok this is Cassi v2, after living there during beta, its not fun.

Missions!
Lets do those, oh wait they all solo (low level ones). "Welcome back friends, now go play on ur own in an mmo".

Damn now I need gear!
Uldah Ward full, cant make any moneys.

Back to leves!
/logout

10 days, not impressive, complete sham, rocked the confidence of my friends for 2.0 and they couldnt make it past the 5th day, why? Diablo 3, a well polished and new exciting game, something XIV is not right now.

Yoshi relies on us (because he has mentioned it about 3 times) to tell our friends to come back, but when we do all we get is some dried up bread rather than a gorgeous cake, I know personally the game isnt where it is supposed to be, but I would have at least thought there might be something during the Umbral that ANYONE at ANY LEVEL could experience, but I was wrong. I also think these 10 days would have severed better later on, like during the 2.0 beta or something.

This is just the result of me and my friends having a crappy experience, but then reading comments on community websites, its a shared experience.

The only good thing they can sum up, is that they're happy the lag from release is gone, and that the game is slowly going in the right direction, but there isn't enough for them to see any changes. Especially when everything content related is pretty much end-game now.