Waaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiittttt!
Stop!
Do you actually know what a curve is?
I guess not
I'm going to assume that you didn't play in early ARR? To put a long story short, the 'expert' dungeons of the time were a little more challenging, not in terms of mechanical complexity, but rather they punished you if you didn't respect them. You couldn't simply heal through most failures with little more than a regen like you can now. More importantly, many mechanics in the 'expert' dungeons were watered down copies (typically slower and more clearly telegraphed) of the mechanics you'd see later on in the EX primals. Antabooga taught you to hide behind pillars for Garuda HM whilst the Demon Wall taught you many of the fundamentals for Titan HM.
This resulted in a smooth and progressive difficulty curve with each tier leading nicely on to the next. Farming dungeons prepared you for Titan, farming Titan prepared you for Coil. I know you might find this hard to believe, but people managed just fine. Back in early ARR I was part of a series of linkshells that helped people with Titan HM clears for their relic, these weren't hardcore players, most of them didn't even bother with Coil. It was just a sizeable community of predominantly casual players that enjoyed the fight as well as helping others with it. Don't believe me? Here's a 13:47 Titan HM kill with them that got recorded and uploaded. Do you think 8 modern day Rabanastre randoms would manage to survive that long? Frankly, I don't.
What we have currently is absolutely indefensible. Leveling dungeons are routinely harder than 'Expert' dungeons (which are an insult to the term) whilst the gate keeper primals are significantly more complex and harder to learn than O1S (Which is doubly sad because these primals certainly aren't up there with the likes of Ramuh or Thordan, O1S is just that lame). Perhaps most importantly, both 24 man and end game dungeons 'teach' players that not paying attention and simply ignoring everything is A OK. Lo and behold, they step up into Savage or an EX primal and get completely annihilated doing the same things that served them well in everything prior. This is not a curve, this is a wall. Walls within a community are a bad thing IMHO.
Oh talking about O1S
Ok yes, I'll give you Lakshmi, that is most definitely a gimmick fight. O1S though? Are you actually being serious here? Lets see now:
1) Ice Floor.
2) Fireballs.
3) Tank buster tether.
4) Knockback.
5) 1 HP.
5 mechanics does not make a complex fight. Literally the sole factor that makes O1S even remotely challenging is the risk of sliding/getting pushed off the edge. That's it. A wall around the arena, the typical AoE+cleave telegraphs, some pacing tweaks and an appropriate adjustment to it's HP would make it one of the easier story primals.
How about you stop seeing in absolute extremes and actually think for a moment about what's being said?
Nonsense, you just can't see beyond your own blinkered prejudices here.
The skill gap between the raiding scene and casuals in early ARR was nothing like the massive gulf we've had pretty much since HW. Why? It wasn't because content was 'harder' because that just wasn't the case. I'm of the opinion that it was due to both content forcing you to respect it's mechanics at all stages of the end game as well as a much better sense of progressive difficulty especially when compared to the spikes and troughs we have today.
I can confirm that it's not, try it for yourself.
That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead think of how a new player would progress through the content they would face today.
Rather, a more logical difficulty curve should be something like this:
ARR Leveling dungeons > HW Leveling dungeons > SB Leveling dungeons > Expert Roulette + Story mode primals >> 24 man >> EX Primals >> Savage >>>> Ultimate.
Instead what we have is something like this:
ARR Leveling dungeons > Expert Roulette > Most Story mode primals + 24 man > HW Leveling dungeons + SB Leveling dungeons >>> O1S >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> EX Primals + O2S >> O3S + O4S >>>> Ultimate.
Frankly, it might as well be a bowl of pasta with some names in it with how coherent and progressive it is. Even the above is arguably giving it more credit than it deserves.