Personally, I feel like the relics are easier to get this time around because the devs realise that tying relics to Eureka is not a 'sustainable' way of making relics. What I mean by that is both Zodiac and Anima are possible to do today, and player retention largely doesn't matter towards their creation. Eureka is likely to be dead content come next expansion, so its best if as many people as possible get their relic now.

That also ties into another reason why relic making was so fast this time around, and that's because so many people were doing Eureka. As fewer people do Eureka, the process of making a relic weapon becomes slower and slower. It's true for older relic weapons too, such as light grinding and fate farming phases, that's why they had to nerf those processes to make it faster eventually. But neither of those are to the same scale as Eureka relics, because Eureka is data center collaboration rather than world collaboration. That brings up the problem of how they're going to nerf the current step, because unless they drastically increase protean crystal gain and make NMs, especially Pazuzu, doable with a single party, this step is going to be impossible in a year's time.