Now, completely getting rid of experience is not an option. Leveling is a very important part of MMORPGs, and a lot of people (me among them) enjoy it. So what options do we have?

One option would be what FFXI did very well, a Merit system. For those who didn't play FFXI, the Merit system was basically a system where you were earning experience toward unlocking some skills and traits instead of levels. Now, this is an easy solution, however more skills is not viable in FFXIV for the reasons evoked before.

An other option would be to have levels on actions and traits themselves, allowing to upgrade them. We already have that in PvP in a way, and it is quite a fine system. It gives some personalisation options, ... One way to "improve" it to make it more experience relevant would be to allow players to select which action the experience goes to. Improving the actions by using them would also be an option, but I see too many problems coming from that (long cooldown actions being very hard to upgrade, people spaming an action in dungeon to level it instead of playing properly, ...).