Variance in player skill is hurting FFXIV's itemization design.

[Granyala]

Because they like the challenge? SE split off the story because it gated far more players that were only interested in the story. I doubt raiders care all that much. Most of the ones I know do the harder content for no other reason than they enjoy the difficulty, and seeing whether they can top themselves or not later.

Most of the people YOU know.
But you must be aware that challenge seekers are only a tiny fraction of the playerbase. And that's okay, I don't think SE expects huge savage participation, after all it's supposed to be fringe content for the elite that dares.

People here seem to think that to small a percentage cares about raids, which leads to recruitment difficulty, which in turn leads to them wanting raiding to be more rewarding so people get bribed into it so they can keep a stable roster more easily.

I tried to tell them that this wouldn't work, because they'd get tons of raiders that don't have the correct mindset for challenge seeking, leading to all kinds of nasty raid drama. Alas, no one listens.

As far as the current state of raid rewards go, the rewards last for maybe 3-6 months tops (this is being very generous) within obtaining them.

Raid rewards (except titles and mounts) always last till the next raid Tier is released.
That's roughly 6 months.

The third failure is their complete botching of the reward to difficulty tuning ratio of Savage -- an issue compounded by the first two problems creating no fluid or natural progression path into the Savage tier of difficulty.

I still think it would have been better if Savage rewarded vanity only. Unique set models, dyable, maybe cool particle effects as options.
Such rewards are decoupled from the item level treadmill and withstand the test of time much better than random stat gear that looks like the normal version and gets replaced as soon as new content hits.

IMO if you're a PvE game, you need real PvE progression. Not a huge wall between 90% of the game's content and the hardest 4 fights of the game.

Agreed. SE essentially made the same mistake Blizzard did.
Whole game is easy peasy... want to raid -> vertical mountain climb in difficulty.