The Relic Quests are a great example of poor game design

[Driavna]

Nah, this convoluted design is a way around how outdated certain areas of the game are. Simply put, FFXIV can't handle upgrading an item or is very taxing for the system to do it (since with can customize relics secondary stats), what we really do is exchanging ours for a new one. Other MMO's don't have this problem and all you need to do is apply the upgrade without losing something like materia/glamour.

Same reason they need to add a new version of an existing item to remove glamour limitations.