More Horizontal Progression please

[Ibi]

I would rather kill something (on average) 14 times, than do the current method of Alex NM drops.

Which would be less of an issue if it was, as you say, just a matter of killing it.

As that page indicates, "It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours for Leaping Lizzy to spawn." Not to mention that when the population was high, even a Notorious Monster that dropped a level 7 item like that had competition at almost all times. Speaking from experience, you could easily dedicate an entire weekend to camping it, maybe get a handful of claims, and easily walk away from the entire weekend with nothing to show for it.

Finally getting the item was usually a feeling of relief rather than any kind of excitement.

And if you want an item to be relevant for a long period of time (which seems to be the crux of what people are looking for in horizontal progression), you either have to 1. make items incredibly difficult and/or time consuming to obtain or 2. make items ridiculously situational so that everyone needs a huge number of items to be competitive.

Otherwise everyone gets what they need quickly and then, since the items are designed to last a very long time, doesn't need any new items for a very long time. At that point, what's the point in doing any of the content, unless the content is enjoyable enough that it's worth doing for it's own sake (rather than for the reward).

And if the events are fun enough to do regardless of the rewards, it ceases to matter whether the rewards have vertical or horizontal advancement.

[Iagainsti]

Which would be less of an issue if it was, as you say, just a matter of killing it.

As that page indicates, "It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours for Leaping Lizzy to spawn." even a Notorious Monster that dropped a level 7 item like that had competition at almost all times. Speaking from experience, you could easily dedicate an entire weekend to camping it, and easily walk away from the entire weekend with nothing to show for it.

Finally getting the item was usually a feeling of relief rather than any kind of excitement.

Lantern Shield, Thief's Knife are two others that almost made me cry, I recall I needed another rng drop even to get the nm to spawn for Thief's Knife.
Let's not even get into Abyssea #fml i believe there are charts to show how complex getting some NMs and HNMs to pop. FFXIV despite it's inflated ilvl system, is much better for ppl; gives us time to do other things instead of making gaming into another career/time sink.