At this point the devs don't really care about the open world. The situation has worsened since ARR.

In Heavensward and Stormblood areas they made every mob (except for Sprites) hostile and apparently it's their way of making the world feel more dangerous which is actually just lazy. They did a nice job with how mobs act in 1.0 and it's dissapointing to see what it has evolved to.
Also all of that doesn't matter because of flying making it irrelevant.

Meanwhile FATEs were given an occassional exp bonus but they're still time-consuming and mindless to do so the addition didn't change anything.

Hunts however, they could always make it a FATE type thing where people have to sync their item level to participate.