I concur to an extent, but at the same time, you do realize the reason the FATE doesn't spawn every 10-15 minutes is that nobody bothers with the others... right?

SE isn't generally known for being forgiving of player aversion to certain types of content. FFXI demonstrated this rather strongly, and FFXIV, while being gentler, will undoubtedly follow the same path. They're going to use small incentives to push people into experiencing ALL of the content - not just the content that gets you from Point A to Point B in the absolute fastest way.

Also:

  • Do not scale
  • Do not impact the world at all
  • Nearly impossible to fail
  • End in ~30s
  • Pose no challenge
  • Are generic as possible
FATEs do scale now. They probably should have to begin with, but your first point is now invalid.

They were never likely to impact the world. It would require exceedingly large amounts of time to develop a system that organic, and wouldn't have been worth launching with such a feature. Also, look at Campaign in FFXI - sometimes large-scale events that impact the world in an even minor fashion end up disasters when people inevitably abandon the content down the road.

They are nearly impossible to fail and pose no challenge (kind of the same here, don't you think?) because they're meant to be attacked by very diverse groups of individuals who generally aren't in parties with each other. If they made them challenging, then unless you had a FC or something forming the core group in a fight, the system would break down entirely. Come on now.

They no longer end in 30s in virtually any zone in the game. Sure they did initially - but content is always clogged when titles launch. Developers don't base systems around this load because it's very temporary, as we're now seeing.

And finally, they're generic because it's hard to come up with dozens of diverse battles that are also able to be done by groups with radically different compositions. Nobody likes an event that falls apart if X job isn't around to do Y thing to the creature.

Seriously, there are some valid complaints for FATEs, but your "question" is just stupid.