I cannot agree to any of this. You are basically saying that SE should not do anything to shake things up even at casual level game play. People are not asking for them to make the relic quest where you need to beat bosses harder than Thordan or Savage. What people are asking is to at least put some breathing room in the relic quest line. It doesn't have to be difficult content, but it should be fun content. Something to get you out of that grind mind set, even if it is just for a little while. I think you have failed as a company when you have tons of people dreading on how not creative the quests is and they are not fun at all, then you make an excuse on why it has to be not fun. The very same people who preach that if people are not having fun with it, you did something wrong.
Seriously, wouldn't of it been great instead of running old dungeons from ARR again which in itself took no time at all, you instead offer an interesting puzzle that has you going around the world finding clues, then working together with the community to put the pieces together, figure it out, then finish the quest and continue on your new grind. It is called breathing room where you don't go from a painful grind to another painful grind. It just blows a fuse in a lot of people.
You are not going to make any content without shaking up the community a bit, its going to happen no matter what. Why not attempt to give them something they didn't know they wanted? SE lost it's creativity and is now just putting mindless grinds in and poor attempts to bring FFXI like content into this game. All they can accomplish is getting people back in the game for a short while before they head off again. They barely do anything now to influence people to stay in. Playing too much into the safe route and catering too heavily on the casual audience, they are going to learn the hard way that it is not a good idea. Again, they think only short term, not long.
It feels like at this point that FFXIV doesn't know what it wants to be anymore and we all suffer for it.