Again, I hate the term. In XI we never said "hardcore" or "casual."
Either you sucked or you were good, it didn't matter if you were a full time student, full time worker, or both.
The good, the bad, and the average. Those were the players. There was no "hardcore" or "casual" and "who is SE going to make content for?"

Right now, you can classify me as a "hardcore" player *cringe*.
What do casuals think I want? To spend 6 hours a night running the same boring and easy dungeons over and over again, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, just because you and your LS can't or doesn't?
Or to kite an NM in Hamlet in a circle for ten minutes for a seal... over and over and over?

I feel like these terms "hardcore" and "casual" got dragged into the FF community from elsewhere and now all we discuss is how tedious we want everything to be so you filthy casuals can't get your slimy hands on the drops.

Au contraire.

Good players simply want content that justifies them being a good player, or being in a good linkshell. FFXI accomplished this. BLM's and RDM's solo'ed NMs in sky and sea where entire linkshells would sometimes wipe. Linkshells defined themselves by killing (or even monopolizing) mobs others could not even get to 98% before the wipe. There were reasons to be a good player, not just a hardcore player, and many of the very best players were full time students or worked 50 hours a week. The most accomplished BLM on my server had to leave for weeks at a time because he was in the Coast Guard.

This whole notion of "hardcore" versus "casual" is annoying. It's a dumb WoW term (or wherever it came from!) and has no place, IMO, in a Final Fantasy community. Good or bad. Which are you? We want SE to give us the content to find out.