I guess it's time

[RiceisNice]

It's not about Gear or Items themselves. It's the cycle the Game has.

Square Enix (The Developement Team) spoke about, that A Realm Reborn is the foundation of upcoming Expansions. These Expansions build on the Foundation, "Adding more Systems and Content".
The Truth is simple, nothing has changed as the Thread Creator said it, Heavensward is just a little modification of A Realm Reborn, going the same routine.

IMO this really shouldn't be the case. Each expansion should be a new foundation that is added on top of the previous one. There's so very little you can do if they all use the previous expansion as the foundation to build upon that; it leaves much to be desired in regards to content implementation, and especially for setting up new content in the upcoming patch cycles.

2.0 they had to redo the gameplay entirely, while adding elements like jumping, companions, the like. That's worked out very well, the world becomes a bit more fleshed out. 3.0 brought in flying, which allowed them to make the new areas as big as they are now, but the problem comes with it is that it's mostly fluff at this point because there's really no reason to be in the open world; not taking advantage of the wide open world and flying.

If their expansion is just going to add on top of what the previous installation did, how is that any different from a patch? They've already added an entirely new job and pvp modes within each patch cycle, yet I feel that designs like FC crafting and MCH come nowhere close to as polished or in-depth as say the original frontlines or NIN.