dLVL is not in fact garbage. It's an easy and streamlined way of adjusting difficulty without requiring extreme micromanagement of monster attributes.

The only problem here is that XIV's dLVL grows exponentially in important, and by exponentially I meant it's a factor of 10 or something (that was a hyperbole, btw), and in fact, EVERYTHING seems to work in an exponential manner in that you only see any actual gain on things that are almost or directly at whatever soft/hard cap exists. Check master Kaeko's blog and you'll notice that trend.

If they could cut down on the importance of dLVL or, more importantly, make it more linear rather than exponential it'd be better. Hell if you check out Kaeko's research on blocking, you get roughly a 60% damage decrease each Block on something your level (depending on shield attributes) and on stuff like Ifrit and Moogle that hopelessly outlevel you it goes down to god-damn 12%. It'd be cool if it was down to 30%/40% since it's almost 10 levels above, cutting down effectiveness by 50%, but making it almost 1/6th for eight levels?