I guess it's time

[Fumijj_Gah]

What dictates hardcore to you? Is it how long it takes to get an item? Or is it the actually level of difficulty in the content?

Both, long and hard contents were all around on XI back in time. With honest rewards people gonna be -proud- for years, see the Armada Hauberk set for DPS or even the relic itself.
FFXIV is just a loop of a really boring pattern where rewards gonna get deprecated in few weeks/months.
Like I've wrote before in this thread, relic quest should be like this;

a) Killing the highest raid tier multiple times (x10).
b) Getting the drop (?? item) from the same turn with a very low drop rate.
c) Getting another drop (?? item) from a secondary end game content with the same difficulty level (highest tier) such dynamis.
d) Including high amount of gils in the process.
e) Pushing the exploration, open world contents; collecting items around the world in extremely dangerous areas (raid team required to get through them).
f) Getting highest tier crafters together (those few around if we had a decent crafting system) in order to craft the item itself and to pull overmelds.


And yeah, your signature explains straight away how sick is FFXIV at the moment, with the director focusing on 'fun' and not 'dedication', 'skill' and 'rewards' which are the true essence of MMORPGs.
He even fails on the 'fun' point cause the game is super boring at the moment. If for 'fun' he means dancing emotes and few casual contents which are going to get old after few hours, then yeah, he -really- does it wrong.