If you had foresight/planning there was never a point at which you didn't make visible progress, farming pops for final tiers? Yeah while your still farming currency or did you wait til that's all you still needed then went to try to get your pop while noone in your (hopefully static) group needed currency? Fighting the mid bosses to get the pops for the next again all while still farming currency. If you somehow were in a group where you found yourselves flooring currency then yes you saw no progress at times, you did however realize that you all had no use at all for anything more down the road.
Here we get nothing. I go farm hamlet for? Just there for seals, w/e I'll eat that time sink, I'd rather see more drop from hamlets to make it worth more than just the seals, dyna armor/weapons/currency/etc.. I get mats together for weapon no big takes awhile but that's fine, I got something and see progress, I also get other random mats. Make weapon hope for HQ or just take NQ. Go SB materia, I'll farm primal items(I don't actually want to do primals cause of the drop rates but I do anyway). Double meld ... break, sweet let's start from mat farming again ... You've just slapped my progress in the face and made it sad.
In the end, kill the double meld, add more drops to hamlet so your not walking away with just nothing, ones people actually want mind you. Your good, AV/CC not happy about it, but it's not a horrible thing. The problem remains that you do things in this quest line with no reward/progress/guarantees what so ever. Relics in XI it wasn't until the end they were truly brutal, but even then you continued to get things you and or your group want. Here you get spit on.
Was Dyna painful, yes, should this be painful, yes, but it shouldn't slap you in the face. That gob never broke my stuff, and all the NPC crafted gear, yeah it didn't get broken, never saw someone break a Mythic/Empy. I never walked out of Dyna/Assault/Einheijer(sp) with nothing to show for it. What would make me want to do that now, in a game that's "more accessible" and "doesn't alienate" people?
I should mention at some point that while I use FFXI as a refrence point I'm not saying I'd like it back. I don't want to do Dyna/Assault/Sea/Sky anymore or I would still be doing them. I never remember feeling so negatively about new content in XI though, which is why I draw the comparison. Even the content that I looked at and said, I'll probably never finish this but I'm gonna try was not so depressing with the possibility of working backwards.