Problem is, people's favorite features of FFXI are why no one plays FFXI.

The shit that was okay back then was because we were kids, and had time to play inordinate amounts of time.

The shit that was okay back then was because we didn't know any better; FFXI was almost a direct import of Everquest and the grind and RNG nature of it was acceptable. This isn't the case anymore and you're not going to have people droning to sub to a P2P game where they can't even log in and accomplish anything. If for every action they do their only reward for 3 hours of work is dark matter, that's not going to work in the long run.

Garuda has a better system than the other primals/dungeons, but PUGs can't beat Garuda so that's largely irrelevant.