Quote Originally Posted by kaynide View Post
That’s a fair point, and I’m not really sure what “replaced” the development time. Like, assuming something along the lines of “the Hildy story takes 100 hours of total dev time”. What was done instead in that 100 hour block? Viera/Hrothgar? Ocean fishing? The Hyper-Mecha-Gundam-Z instance? The optimization/code overhauls to prepare for PS5? Work on cross-world/cross-data center?

There was a lot of new stuff that appeared in the expansion that obviously needed a significant amount of dev time because it was built from the ground up as opposed to a copy paste like Deep Dungeon. Unfortunately a lot of this new stuff was very behind the scenes and not necessarily content we players can “do”, so it does feel like there was less done.
We've heard that deep dungeon resources specifically were instead allocated to stuff like Ishgard, Bozja, and, most relevantly, island sanctuary. A deep dungeon would've released in 5.3... instead, that's when we got Bozja. Island sanctuary had been in development this whole time and is only just now being released for 6.0 which could potentially free up a ton of dev resources. While I usually think that new, deep forms of content are great to get... I think I'd survive if we didn't get one for 7.0, and they just stuck to what we were used to (after everything we already know we're getting) through 6.0. If the trade off is losing out on current pack content for something huge next pack, I think we've had enough of that.