Why is "It's something to do" apparently a valid defense?

[Alahra]

The relic's purpose is to allow a way for people to earn high lvl weapons through investing time rather than tackling the very highest difficulty. The relics were never really intended to be better in any way than top tier raid gear.

That's probably up for debate, actually. While the developers assign a rather small impact to the secondary stats, Zodiac weapons had a higher stat budget than all equivalent item level weapons from the Novus stage through Zeta. That resulted in about an extra 10 Determination or Crit for a Zeta weapon versus a Dreadwyrm Weapon, in 2.5.

[Catwho]

I've been chewing on this thread for a few days, and I wanted to say that "It's something to do" isn't the way I feel about it at all.

It's more like, "A goal to strive for." That's what was missing since 3.0 came out - the only goals I had were all oriented around getting my classes to 60 and getting my titles for doing so. This is the first longer term, serious effort goal I've had in 3.x, and for that, I see nothing wrong with making it take as much time as I'm willing to not put effort into getting it. Slow and steady is fine. Goals don't have to be immediate to be worthwhile.

[KitingGenbu]

I'm pretty sure that the Japanese population outweighs the NA/EU population in this game, so I'm not really getting where people are thinking the team isn't listening to their player-base. English speakers just tend to be more vocal about things but still give SE money hoping the complaints will matter. Other countries just dont support the product if they dont like it, like in Korea.

[Kaurie]

I'm pretty sure that the Japanese population outweighs the NA/EU population in this game

Do you have any data to support this? I would have thought the opposite.
Though, there are 32 servers for Japan and 32 total for NA / EU, so it's probably pretty similar.

[Conando]

I don't think it's so much that the population outweighs the Western population, I'm pretty sure it's that it's more evenly distributed between servers rather than there being a few big servers in the West with mostly dead servers otherwise.