So how about them new dungeons? (Layout and difficulty)

[AeraLure]

I feel like you are looking at the dev resources a little bit too simplistically. Part of the problem is not the amount of resources, but the inherent design of the game. FFXIV has shown that they have no problem pouring resources into making overly convoluted systems which would otherwise be a simple thing in other games (hall of the novice, SSS, Diadem, LoV etc.) They have the resources and the time, the issue is they have the design choice that their players will ultimately lower everything down to the lowest common demonstrator, so why create a more interesting/complex system that they'll tear apart anyway? In other words, the community will make it boring, so we'll just make it boring on release instead of wasting our time. It's a similar stance they have on anything that offers an "illusion of choice". Some people prefer it that way, I certainly don't, but that is the purposeful design that Square is taking. It has been successful, so why stop?

This, but I feel it's not just the players. Or rather, that it isn't the players at all. The players are adapting to playing the game as designed, and the use of tokens and tomes with nothing of actual use or interest in a dungeon makes for speed running and tunnel vision to be ideal. There is literally no reason to explore branched paths or do optional objectives. Waste of time. So yes, players will dumb down content, but that's because the game design is a bit dumbed down as well. Unfortunately.

[RiceisNice]

This, but I feel it's not just the players. Or rather, that it isn't the players at all. The players are adapting to playing the game as designed, and the use of tokens and tomes with nothing of actual use or interest in a dungeon makes for speed running and tunnel vision to be ideal. There is literally no reason to explore branched paths or do optional objectives. Waste of time. So yes, players will dumb down content, but that's because the game design is a bit dumbed down as well. Unfortunately.

There is also the side where not all players will go for that approach. I have no qualms doing my expert a day for 6 days (provided it's actually a roulette and not a goddamn coinflip, otherwise it just gets incredibly tedious) compared to capping my lore from farming EX primals for the pigeons or midas for token drops. The current design is incredibly bare bones and limited that you can't build upon it if you wanted to. Just having expert dungeons be level synced to the gear that it drops would already make the boss mechanics in general seem more meaningful because to this day, I do not know how you would remove the stacking debuff on the final boss of PS(HM)...if you can/need to remove it because the damage it gains from each stack is already dwarfed by the gear you have by the time you enter it.