How I wish Eureka was

[MageBlack]

You should double check your sources on that one.

My apologies, except for the end stage at the end of the expansion, and loaded to the nuts with Materia. But that is at the end so then we should be comparing the full relic process from attaining the initial weapon at the beginning then all the steps needed to take to get to that final product. Since we dont have that with Eureka yet, we should be comparing first step relic for 2.0 and 3.0 to 4.0, was it involved, insane, and super difficult to get?

Of course to the first, but imo it's very much worth sharpening our own creative teeth when we're given reason after reason to believe the dev team's has gnawed stale, ever-hardening design paths so long theirs have dulled.

I totally agree, theory crafting is fun to do and sometimes the devs might see a tidbit that sparks their imagination. That, I feel, is the whole point of this thread and those like it. No issues with that at all!

Sorry for the tangential comment, but it's actually that quality that makes it stand out to me as an area of wasted potential (e.g. perhaps even due to not enough resources going into it), much like Eureka, far more than your counterexamples (which were more alike to waste by aim/principal). PotD could be incredibly fun to just about everyone, and yet it's been left massively hit-or-miss, with a huge amount of its playtime owed to its speedy leveling advantages.

I do agree that PotD could have been, more. What I personally liked about it is its randomness, it showed me that SE is finally willing to make content that isnt completely scripted and because of its "success" (however you want to quantify it) it also told the devs that this style of content has potential. HoH will tell us if they are going to build on that "success" or if they are just going to reskin, afraid that changing it will be to risky. I'm hoping for bigger, more varied rooms, different mechanisms to open a floor, more mini-bosses, and this summoning thing really intrigues me, I hope its like that FC summoning they talked about eons ago.

Also I'm tired of this "All this time spent developing it and all the dealys and THIS is all we get?!?" If this was the ONLY step we got for all of 4.0 then I would agree with you but we will be seeing the next step come with each successive half patch. That means they have been working on all 4 stages of eureka as a whole piece of content. When we got PotD or Diadem, that was it, done. Then they worked on the next one for the next expansion. I'm not making excuses for what we got at the first stage but i'm not using that as a stick to beat them up with.