My issue with raiding and relics are as follows:
First, raiding. Now personally I have no issue with the act thereof. What grates on my nerves raiding here is the inability to behave like human beings, you know with; class, compassion, understanding, in effect a desire to give as well as receive. People are caught with "their" time. Your time is no more valuable than mine. Our clocks work the same way. If you don't want to invest the time in people MMOs are not for you.

Secondly is relics. Here is where it gets a little sketchy for me. I do not MIND grinds so long as they have limitations. To put it into perspective as I have seen many people state RNG is bad if there is no fail safe. In effect if you didn't have the zeta to sacrifice therefore having to fate farm for crystals a fixed number of fates should have rendered out what you needed, refreshing once the limit had been reached. My other complaint is this unmitigated desire to involve free marketing with the relic build, i.e. crafted components or the sub components to make them. I get it, they want gil to exchange hands to keep everything flowing and things like this helps that system work. However, the underlying problem with this, ultimately, is greed. No not everyone is like this I grant you but the exception does not break the rule, it merely shines more light upon it.

You may say things like "level your crafts" or "ask a FC buddy", but what of the people that have no tolerance for crafting? By that I mean they came to this game for the battle content, money was a side note basically they sold something if they found out it could fetch them a decent price and they had no use for it. Crafting does not appeal to all me included. You may say "that's your problem" and you are right, it is. But if I walked up to someone who has no desire to do battle content, only crafting/gathering and they admire my armor stating they wished they had it too and said to them it's their problem for not going to get it that would make me a jerk. What about asking then you say? Well it costs them gil just like it does anyone else.

My point is this: instead of JUST involving a free market system in the making of an end-game weapon they should have offered alternatives to obtain the same items via dungeons. In my mind, like someone on here said, it would have been perfect for Alexander (Gordias) normal. Not everyone has millions to blow.