They really want this game to be simple...

[SwordCoheir]

As much as I'm concerned about the casual focus, I'm not concerned about the long run, and what I'm talking about is ultimately what Yoshida wants, to add as many kinds of content to the game and innovate down the road.

That's not a bad thing mind you, pertty much the number one death of most MMO's outside of being plain broken is lack of content.

As for the game being simple, that's not really a bad thing either if you make things overly complex it becomes extremely difficult to balance jobs and build new abilities and content that wouldn't be broken because class stacking one job makes the fight a cakewalk or excluding one job because it's useless for one fight, or needing a particular piece of gear or you don't get in (IE: That abysmal piece of crap that FFXI had turned into.)

As for skill, any good player is going to destroy an average player, and every great player is going to destroy a good player in damage, healing, and tanking. The linear gear makes up for some of the weaker players lack of skill, granting them an ability to build up and become eventually strong enough to clear most content in time, without needing to go out of their way to find some super rare, overly competed for piece of gear. As such any skillful player will be able to meet the demands of new content much easier without as much gear assistance, thus will complete content much quicker than an average player, and will rewarded for their skill by getting their gear faster making them competitively more powerful overall.