You make good points. In the original post, the friend is mentioned as being 'group oriented.' I think it's very telling, and very disappointing that even a group minded person has reached their limit when it comes to this game.
It's hard to help someone else when the following is true:
No use in crafting things for them, dungeon drops are better and/or they could very easily level all crafts on their own.
No use in repairing their gear, devs removed that option and anyway, by the time gear is worn, you've probably already replaced it.
No use in getting parties together, duty finder has taken care of that.
No way to help them level, again, duty finder or fate farming has them covered.
Can't help with quests, quests are all solo.
Can't help with leves, leves are all solo.
Gathering is also disgustingly easy to level, so no help needed there.
You could help them through dungeons, but in my experience, what ends up happening is that you carry them since your gear is usually way higher than theirs, there's no fun in being carried.
Chimera and Hydra are being added to duty finder, can't bring a full alliance into CT yet.
Really, I'm not sure what group content is left that will help bring a guild together, other than coil statics. Even group minded people are finding a hard time seeing anything to keep them in the game. That's rather sad if you think about it.
EDIT:
This is another good point. I'm a casual with TONS of 'stuff' that I could do, but I'm seriously bored with the game. Before 2.0 hit, and Yoshi was giving us the roadmap, I was happy that he wanted to put in ways to ease older content. Since I'm a casual, that seemed like a good idea. BUT, the way the game has actually turned out, it encourages people to be even more casual. I look at it and say it's too casual, so casual that I picked up FF6 the other day because I wanted something fun to play ^^





