Something needs to be done about the empty open world

[ItMe]

The conversation about what is in the world zones and what value they have and what we could use more of is good, but I wanna focus on this for a sec:

Majority of players including me don't care about fates, hunts and maps because they do not contribute to character power.

As Jeeqbit touched on page 2,
-- Hunts give tomestones for gear and materia to deck it out.
-- FATEs are a good way to level.
-- Maps and gathering are great ways to make gil (an increase to "soft power"), and the later nets ingredients for food and pots.

Which leads to my question: what other methods of player power progression do you think open world content can help with?
It seems to have its bases covered, and that your issue is more with FF14's progression system itself and less the way the open world fails to feed into it.