He's right about the difficulty. It's simply not here, especially in terms of storyline. Divine Might, Alexander (when it came out), the pots, Promys, Airship, Shinryu (without brew), hell even basic Avatars sometimes had some difficulty to it.

There is nothing hard about FFXIV in regards to the story. They tossed Van Darnus 1.0 at us and the toughest thing about that was server congestion.

Now I understand story difficulty isn't everyone's cup of tea but I personally feel they should just add a damn difficulty slider on the instance fights. People who want to get abused can, and those who don't want to can slide by for the story. Perhaps at the end give out a reward based on the average difficulty slider rating for your instance fights.

Garuda, Extreme, and Van Darnus hard can be challenging, but all of them lack that magic that the promys had or gathering people to kill Promathia.