"No one would do dungeons if FATEs were too rewarding!" tends to be the old standby, which has no doubt played into their minimal EXP reward over time. Obviously, part of my own dungeon ennui is a distaste for queues. "Do something else until it pops!" may work for some people, but I'd rather just dive into something at will if I really want to do it. It's a luxury that becomes a harder sell the moment you demand 3/7/23 others on the same page and not turn into toxic buttgoblins if something goes wrong. Pragmatically, FATEs should at least be serving as an alternative to quests that no longer exist for follow-up jobs once cleared. And while some may argue that they technically do offer EXP, they're not really in the same league, nor are pitiable gil payouts going to be buying people hundreds of k in gear off the MB if they're no riding out augmented Ironworks/Shire/Scaevan until next tier.

In terms of variety, we ultimately need to consider how spontaneous quests can manifest:
- Kill X
- Fetch Y
- Go to Z
- Defend Q

For the most part, these are the skeletons we have to work with. You could have something like the coeurl queen FATE where it's "Kill X minions" until she finally shows up. Defense sorts can be stationary objects or escorts, where sometimes these do chain into later FATEs if they don't fail due to inactivity. The Fetch ones probably wind up being lame because they often double as Kill types, without really being exploratory or "puzzling" since you know whatever you need is in the marked circle.

Mechanically, the system otherwise has issues people noted where a train can make a subsequent respawn harder for smaller groups/soloists. This would definitely need to be on the "fix it" list if considering grander overhauls, to the point that difficulty should really be fluctuating based on people within range/synced in the moment. Bosses gaining new moves and/or spawning new/additional minions should probably be a given, but at the same time, also more thought provoking than just bundling together to AoE.

Personally, when I think back to my Rift days, I look fondly to those occasions where I'm single-handedly keeping a zone event alive because I was protecting a wardstone while others took out rifts or sub-bosses. People were working together, even if not literally within the same party, for a greater good in the moment. Of course, Rift also suffered from the "Raider's First!" mentality where you could put hundreds of hours into zone events and eventually get a set of gear that'd be comparable to expert dungeons, not even raid level. It always felt like a slap in the face to players like myself because those same people would try to say "you don't need it!" despite the reality devs could also make content where you did, further correlating an interchangibility between content where if you did maybe want to Savage raid for a night, you could without being a detriment to the group because you've still had a source of progression. Perhaps the irony here is that XIV is CLOSE to that with the tomestone system(s), but you have a mix of time gates/weekly caps and unique sources, like Nier raid coins, that ultimately prevent alternative growth. And by the time those aren't needed, it's another expansion/tier creep, anyway. From my perspective, all this runs counter to the whole "all jobs on one character" system since you're pretty much doomed to pick a main and have to settle for everything else being weaker in comparison.

But I'm also someone with an unreliable schedule and family life that can't ever commit to something like a static group, so this is pretty much the point where someone tries to tell me MMOs aren't for me, too. Something I'll eternally call BS on, but I suppose the genre can continue to decline if purists wanna do their thing.