Zojha, you really should think before you post. Looking cool, badass or however you want your character to look is a huge reward for relatively little effort. On top of that, people have ALWAYS had a great care for what their characters they invest time in look like. Do you really want to see your character wearing something like the darklight tank gear? I know I never do again.

But then, let's look at say dungeons and stuff. This game puts out dungeons that give gear that is inferior to the currency you get from it by a large margin that can be spammed. The designs of the dungeons are mostly blah. They can look pretty but there isn't anything to them. This is probably going to be how most games do their dungeons being instanced (DDO had some nice puzzles and stuff though, nothing too complex but fun). Then you have raid content that gets brought out that is equal to or inferior to more easily obtainable gear.Often times coming with it, extremely UGLY gear, or stuff that's dead on arrival. Anyone else remember crystal tower launching with I80 gear? They've had the problem THAT far back.

Those are two VERY different subsets of things to do and reasoning behind it so comparing it is a terrible jump of "logic" on your part.

Part of FFXIV 1.0's major issue was 1) not shipping with a functional threat table. Ya know. That's kinda needed although was fixed. To be honest it was just not finished. At best it was in an early Beta stage at release and Square realized that. It got better but by the time much was done it was decided to scrap it entirely.