ARR should be heavily condensed honestly. It's an useless slog and it just makes people want to quit with how dragged out and full of filler it is.

First time I played FF14 I ended up quitting because I just didn't want to deal with ARR story anymore, it was so abysmally bad. When I came back I just bought a story skip just because I didn't want to deal with how pathetic the ARR story is. For the part of ARR that I played(until level 50 or so), I felt like a UPS driver delivering packages to people all over the world rather than doing something actually useful.

I've invited 10 irl friends to this game, none of them remained with it. They like the game, the gameplay, the combat, dungeons, they despise the ARR story.