I've never understood why people turn their nose up at "savage" raids or any other kind of difficult end game fights and then say there is no end game content... (for them I guess)
I feel ya on the fact that the raids are feeling like they are lacking something. I've raided in other games (wow,rift...etc) and the "golden days" of that was that even when we had bosses like illidan on farm (back when it was a new raid) it would still take quite a bit of time to get to him and beat him. Even then there might be a second whole raid to do, so you had something to do for two or three days, even in "farm mode". Here in ffxiv, once you get a raid on farm, you are done in a single night usually and then since you have nothing to do for the rest of the week as a static group. The members kind of lose touch and the groups tend to fall apart after they reach the farm stage...even before everyone has their stuff "farmed"! It's because they lose their purpose as a functional group. Sure they might play other games together or get the band back together for the next raid "tier" but I'd say that is more the exception instead of the rule.
For most, since the raid content is so short, even the first boss can be intimidating for most people as everything else in this game is much easier (laughably easier in comparison). If the raid content was a bit more drawn out, it would be much easier for the devs to fan out the boss difficulty more but since we get 4 bosses each tier they go from easy to hard pretty quick. Wouldn't it be great if the raid content was more popular and they put in like 10 bosses instead? Almost everyone would probably *try* raiding then. Because the first 2-3 bosses could be easy enough to wet people's appetites. The way it is now, people even avoid a9s, as easy as it is, because they just fear the steep climb. And that is sad... because it makes threads like this one where people are saying "we want more endgame content but no thanks on the raids!"? I would guess that is because they see the raids that we do get and haven't tried raids in other games that are more in depth.
Am I wrong? What do you guys think about it all?