The drop rate is slightly better, as it should be since you spend more time flying around these huge zones than actually participating in fates it seems like. It still RNG, sure, but it's not as a bad as atma was originally, plus we can level up with the fates unlike before where you had to be on that job with the relic equipped to get an atma. The set of dungeons are guaranteed drops, you don't have to run them until you get an rng drop, although we do have to run those on the job we selected vs before we could run the dungeons on any drop. I'll take the rng-free approach here as a good improvement, as well. The other steps aren't all that different, we had to spend a lot of tomes on the books before and now we just have a few more options instead of tomes only, and the crafted items are pretty equal (wasn't there 12 or 16 crafts for zodiac? I don't recall since I didn't finish that part of the quest.) The weapon is outdated, sure, but there is less RNG overall and more flexibility how to accomplish.

I'm not white knighting, my general opinion that SE flubbed the early part of expansion has not changed. I think it's important for us to let them know the good along with the bad, and most people only seems to be focusing on the bad which doesn't particularly help anyone find the solution.