Players have the right to plead for what they want in an mmo, but blaming the playerbase for a developer's actions is like blaming games like gta for school shootings. There's various ways they could have worked this system out. In all honesty, the hunt system isn't even that bad; it's just that the rewards were too powerful. They could have put out a set of i100 hunt gear with different itemization that would help more in open world combat, but they chose the path of least resistance.

Lazy design. It's at the heart of almost every bad design decision in this game. From the post zenith relic to hunts, the idea was to use as few resources as possible to stretch content, since the playerbase was screaming that there was nothing to do in 2.1. Raiders would come online mondays, finish turns 1-5 and most of the raid team would log till next monday.

The truth is, there is still a severe lack of endgame content. It's just masked better now because so much is locked behind grinds(post zenith is nothing but a grind, hunt is nothing but a grind).

Currently endgame comprises of 2 lfr style raids(towers) 2 short endgame raids (great boss fights, but the raids themselves are lackluster), 6 ex primal fights, 11 "hard mode" dungeons, and 6 hard mode primals. For a game that's been out for nearly a year, that's honestly not alot of content.

I just can't understand why we haven't gotten a sprawling, epic experience from raids that have 10-15 bosses. That almost any group can kill the first 1-2, but only the best of the best kill the end boss. We're missing that greatly, and if we could only get one of those a year, it would have people hooked.

But that takes effort, money, and a love for your product. All of which Square-enix seems to be unwilling to give.