Simplicity over complexity, time to change.

[Felessan]

Reading through a lot of the dev trackers and notice a trend of favoring to answers questions about vanity, housing, chocobo's, etc.

People in general like these topics a lot.

But avoiding the more potent topics.

Buffer/debuffer jobs was already explained in details as unnecessary complexity. We already have a number of buffs/debuffs split across different classes. And what you want is actually simplifying game as you'll no longer need to think about party organization to get desired buffs/debuffs.

Many are still happily engaged working on T8 and T9, so its not as if they have a lack of things to do.

I know quite a lot of people who still "works" on their Twintania kills. They don't really cares about "game should be difficult" though, they are just casuals that spend some time in game.

I think part of the problem is that MMOs have become built around progression of some sort. We're lead through what often times amount to a un-engaging trek to the endgame which is often times revolves around gearscore, instances, etc...

People needs motivation and goal, not just social bonds. Otherwise most will have a serious doubt - "why pay a subscription fee, when I can get the same in F2P... oh well, I can chat with friends in Skype, I even not need MMO for that".
MMO converges back to usual games, where game should be interesting, somewhat challenging (but not grindy or insanely difficult right off the start) and quality made. And social interaction is just a nice addition.
Otherwise it'll be a niche game for niche people.

In contrast 2.0's Castrum Meridanum is: Queue DF, run through it as fast as possible ignoring the fact half the players don't even know their jobs.

Answer = i100 as ilvl trumps all else.

There are a number of cases where it's not true, not on a weapon side though.

Were armor and weapons able to be made augmentable by a crafter and later augmented by the owner it would create a lucrative market and a gil sink for every player type so long as obtaining them was relatively easy, say something like materia or augment drops in L50 dungeons. This adds incentive for the content, creates a sustainable market and an actual purpose for gil.

And leads to typical for FFXI situation "buy to win" and segregation and elitism when you either have large sums of money or you have not.
A small portion of people are entrepreneurs and many does not have time/dedication to farm for hours, so for them even a million gil already a sizable amount of money. And million gil for actual gear in FFXIV is nothing, crafted and fully melded ilvl70 accessory cost 1 mil per piece in 2.0. Fully melded Saurian/Cashmere/etc gear in 2.2 priced at 2+ mil. T4 crit/det materia on my server priced at 350-400+k per piece, making "optimal" 44/31 crit/det Novus be priced at around 10 millions.
And this is when only most hardcore and dedicated spend money on relatively unneeded and marginal upgrades, if they are become actual upgrades the prices will go up even more and we will see FFXI again. Where you are a gimp without HQ staves, but they are priced so high, that you requires weeks/months of casual farm to gets them.

So we can count out anything lucrative or repetitive gil sinks, any kind of rare sellable world drops or the ability to low man farm content for rare instance drops, basically 1/4 of what makes MMOs fun and rewarding...

There are actually a lot of things that are very expensive, can be exploited by RMT and quite popular (so they have nice liquidity). They just moved out of actual battle content to avoid creating segregation. Rare minions cost fortune, materials for many glamour items/fancy furniture are very expensive, but they can be obtain through simple grind, a lengthy one though.