I'm not saying the Gold Saucer grind is difficult. Very few things are significantly challenging in this game. It's the fact that it's a long, tedious grind that A) is so slow that it never feels like you're making progress B) monotonous and boring. The same can be said of the majority of other grinds in the game: Allied Seals, Relic Weapons, Leveling.

I regularly feel discouraged from even logging onto FFXIV simply because there are so many things to do, yet so many of them are just mindless, awful grinds that take months to complete. If I had absolutely nothing to do in this game, I'd play it more, simply for the fact that I'd feel like I can spend my time on FFXIV doing whatever I want, rather than always having to spend my entire play session dedicated towards achieving a goal that's so far out of sight that I can't even see it on the horizon. Ironically, I'm sure they give us all these long grinds to ensure that players sub to the game, because nothing can be done within a month's time. Yet for myself, all of the grindy content causes me to take breaks from the game spanning anywhere from 1 to 6 months. 1-6 months that I would otherwise have spent paying for and playing this game.