I'm definitely agreed with OP on this. I have tried to get many of my friends to play FFXI over the years, but to a man they have always been disgusted by the amount of mindless, boring grinding you have to do to level anything. It takes a lot of grinding to get to even the start of the marginally interesting content in FFXI, and you have to be level capped to do anything really fun. I, too, am tired of this--three years ago i was already getting bored with it, then Abyssea added even more incentive to not just grind on the same exact enemies, but to stay in the same place doing it for hours at a time. It wasn't long after Abyssea came along that I decided to quit.

While I guess there is something to be said for people to have an option to grind, I can't think of a single MMO besides FFXI and this one where people choose to grind when there's an option to do literally anything else, and I've played just about every other MMO out there at some point or another. I'd like to be able do quest content, or leves, or other stuff like, say, an instanced one on one fight with a mob ala lvl70 genkai to really test your skills. Or to do that with one or two friends. Dungeons/raids should stay with full parties, but that should be a "once every x amount of time" thing and not the primary thing you do. I don't think you should be forced to PUG or find a static to grind on mobs mindlessly to level up at an acceptable rate ala FFXI, because that is murder to anyone trying to bring in friends to the game who wasn't already into it, and what this game needs is more players brought in from outside the small insular FFXI community.

Bottom line, variety is the spice of life, and grind parties are as bland and boring as white bread.