The best part about all the complaints is that those people still play the game, and will continue to play the game.

The design of end-game PVE is fine. It is punishing as heck, as it's supposed to be. If you can't handle punishing as heck PVE, then FFXIV end-game PVE is not for you... It's really that simple. But I'm not getting why people are surprised - just about every MMORPG in existence that has end-game PVE raiding works this way... There are different tiers of end-game content, and the truly end-game stuff is only beaten by a small percentage of players at first. Down the road, things either get nerfed, or new content comes out with better equipment, making older content easier, thus a larger percentage of players will see/complete that content.