The story grind is a problem that Square recognizes. We know this because they said so and are taking action with 5.3 to tighten up some of the ARR missions because too many people were quitting in disgust. Think about that. They are using resources to adjust the story because they are losing enough customers that it make business sense to try to fix a retention problem.

My hope is that they're being conservative because if they are not it's only going to shift the point where customers give up. If successful this could just be the first of several cleanups or if not they may finally concede that story gating is bad for business.

FF has a critical mass of fans that carried XIV through a dark patch. Yes the story does continue to attract that niche but IMO it is not why XIV has been successful. Instead I think XIV's success is mostly due to its stability and predictability. This is shockingly rare in the industry.

Once more, nobody is advocating getting rid of the story or that they should stop any sort of story focus. What people want is for Square to decouple the story from group activity access. Will it kill the game if they don't? Of course not. Will they be as successful as they can be? No and the danger is they will fall to niche status if some other MMO figures out that stability and a predictable content pipeline are the road to success.