I dont know where you guys got the idea that there were a small amount of cutscenes in 1.0, sure the class quests only went up to lvl36, but those quests were ETERNAL, with you traveling everywhere and a bunch of detailed cutscenes everywhere you went plus a few instances per class quest. Also the only reason the class storylines ended at lvl36 was because the new team took over. When people looked at the dat files, there were up to (and in some cases, past) lvl50 storylines but they got thrown out the window once the old team was replaced. The dat files have the storyline past lvl50 in the class quests AND the main scenario (Titan was either lvl52 or lvl56 main scenario in the original teams plan,) however they were in written Japanese and German only, so I have no idea what the storylines were about. For comparison sake, the class quests now are about 1/4th the size of each original class quests, give or take. Also, the ARR storyline is focused on making you feel special, acting like you did a lot by the lvl10-15 quests, when in reality they were no challenge at all. In 1.0, you were special because you had the echo, but they didn't kiss your butt. In fact, I seem to remember them getting mad at your character quite a fews times. lol
Still, like I said before, I am having a BLAST playing ARR. However, SE really needs to release an offline version of FFXIV so noobs can see what they missed. Even better if you could switch on/off the fall of dalamud (which affected the game in many ways, garlean invasions, town invasions, camp invasions, mobs became bigger in size, insane thunder skyline, meteors falling skyline, dalamud in the atmosphere skyline, invasion of mor dhona, etc...) It is doable, just make all mobs lvl 52 cap and instead of having the path companion not be part of the storyline, s/he can always be with you, leveling when you level, fighting what you fight, customizable job for the path companion and BAM, you have a solo-player FFXIV1.0/1.23 hybrid. Yeah yeah yeah, they'll have to rework the RAIDs, no more killing the ants at the same time.A fan can dream...a fan can dream...