Has it always been like this or...?

[Gyson]

Poor attitudes of players aside, in my opinion the practice of scaling down the ilevel of gear in lower level dungeons should be present in every dungeon. I'm not sure why the developers are only interested in maintaining the integrity of the intended challenge only in pre-50 dungeons. I think players would lose a lot of their willingness to charge ahead without everyone else if they didn't outlevel the content by so much.

People were speed running CM back when ilvl90 was the highest you could go. Syncing it down to i90 will change nothing. Unless you mean syncing it down even further to i70 or something. In which case, veteran players will stop doing the story roulette altogether and just farm ST all day for tomes.

Of course 90 is too high. What I meant (in the case of these two storyline dungeons) is syncing players back down to a maximum of i-level 50 or 55. For each and every dungeon I'm sure the developers have an idea of the intended level of challenge - it's probably very close to the minimum i-level required to run the dungeon (or the i-level of the gear that drops within). Those scores serve as a decent guideline for what each dungeon should be syncing players down to. Why this is the norm for nearly all pre-50 content yet thrown out the window once players reach level 50 I'll never understand.

I think your prediction is off. Just as players continue to hit up pre-50 dungeons through low-level roulettes for tomes and other needs (despite the level syncing), they'd continue visiting these other dungeons as well. You'll never convince me that the developers intended for something like Garuda-Hard to be the joke-of-a-farm encounter that it is.

I also think nobody in the party should be able to prematurely end a cutscene if there's a first-timer on the run. That removes both the stress and burden off the new person and allows the content to be experienced as intended by the designers. Unfortunately, few would probably agree to these things because everyone wants their shinies yesterday (so they can then come here and complain about a lack of things to do).

If you do that, people will just straight up leave when they see a first timer, or they will mock and ridicule him even worse than now since they have no option to go ahead with the run.

I disagree that leaving will be the problem you suggest. Watching some cutscenes versus leaving and sitting through a duty-penalty plus another round of queue times? Either option requires time - at least by sticking with the former they get the dungeon done. And who is going to "mock and ridicule" a player for being new to a dungeon, particularly if it's SE making the cutscenes mandatory? It's out of the player's hands at that point (which is the whole point).