Atma farming is an absolute doddle compared to doing the original relic quest in version one.


Let's equate farming atmas with doing hamlet defence. Now hamlet defence itself wasn't that difficult and you only needed three drops from it. The rng on those drops made fates look like an absolute atma fountain though. To try to increase your crop rate you could turn in provisions to the hamlet during the 50 hour preparation phase. Only the top provisioner on each server got the worthwhile drop rate buff. That's ONE per server.
Even to have a chance at being top provisioner would take a huge amount of time gathering. I would typically spend 12 hours a day for three or four days gathering provisions and still need donations of provisions from linkshell members to even have a chance of topping that chart. It took so many full stacks of stuff that you physically couldn't even carry them using your entire inventory. Just like an ebay auction the amount for top provisioner would stay quite low, and then everyone would turn in as much as they could right at the end. Tens of millions of gil worth of provisions (per player) dumped onto the npc in the last few minutes, and if you weren't top you'd pretty much wasted your time. All this for one of the three beastmen seals you needed for just stage one of the relic quest.
Stage two was a doddle, you just traded 25k gc seals for a book. We didn't have fates dropping seals then though. You usually did company leves dropping 100 or so each.
Next you needed beastmen currency which you could farm or buy on the market wards for upwards of 5 mill.
Now we're on to the fun part. Remember the double melded weapon you need for the relic quest in ARR? Well in 1.0 that weapon was tough to make, really tough. The mats cost several hundred thousand. And then another couple of hundred thousand to several hundred thousand for the materia. Oh and the materia meld could fail. Usually did fail actually. Repeatedly. And back then you didn't just lose the materia, you lost everything.
Next you had to spiritbond your half made relic and finally move on to the primals.

All this for your normal relic, so please stop complaining about a little rng in the upgrade quest.