Make relics have the same iLVL as the Raid weapons and released at the same time

[Nezerius]

And you continuously miss mine. If they add relic armor, thus increasing the total amount of relic components per job to six, they will either have to substantially reduce the grind on each individual piece or it's rendered pointless. If it takes several months per piece, almost none will have any relevance whatsoever. Your entire comparison here simply doesn't work. Therefore, the weapon won't take fourteen weeks. It will follower a progression curve similar to Anemos, albeit not quite as fast. So no, the grind may very well not be longer than five weeks. The only way to make relics useful in this scenario is speeding up their acquisition. If relic armor released at i380 but each piece took say, a month each. You wouldn't have more than four pieces, including the weapon, before the next patch. Making it... just glamour.

They don't have to reward them piece by piece, since they can just use the underused armor chest feature for this. That means they won't get the relic set until finishing the grind, meaning no gear rewards until that point.
Well look at that, those players suddenly have a reason to get some crafted or normal raid gear during their grind! Guess those two haven't been invalidated after all! Besides, y'know, gearing up alt jobs, because who would be crazy enough to go through the same grind over again for those?

And if they can't make that work, even though i380 really isn't -that- big of a deal (considering you can just get a full set of crafted i380 in a few days), then it'd be fine to just scrap the entire relic armor thing altogether. The relic quest chain had always been focused on working on improving a weapon anyway.

You missed my point again. I'll rephase. The vast majority of people, spanning all skill and playtime levels despised the Unidentifiable step due to its sheer length. The devs openly acknowledged this backlash hence why they moved away from it ever since. At least until Pagos... and received even more vitriol. Granted, more due to how utterly boring Pagos is. Nevertheless, you may fancy a 3-4 month grind, however, you are a distinct minority. Like I said, they more or less abandoned the enormous grind alternative because people hated it. I guarantee you will never see this again. At best, you will see it compete with the tome weapon and never anything else.

Guessing your memory is rather foggy? The issue with the first set of anima quests was due to the fact that the weapon was the same iLvl as the Gordias raid weapon, and the grind had to reflect a similar time frame. They didn't change it because people hated it, they changed it because they lowered the relic to no longer be at the same iLvl as the current raid. In turn, that allowed them to relax on the time frame requirement on the grind.
Don't believe this? You can read about it in this post from Yoshi-P: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/276368
Added note: the relic being 10 iLvls below the current raid weapon (and 5 below the tomestone weapon) also fits with their concept of "Will not be the strongest weapon at the same time as the rewards for clearing the hardest difficulty content."

A "distinct minority" hasn't stopped SE from making changes or adding something to the game. The weapon in your signature is a clear example of that. I imagine the amount of players going for a long grind to obtain relics is significantly higher than the amount of players going for an Ultima Weapon Ultimate or Unending Coil clear.