Level squish?

[Ameela]

With a lot of games hitting the 15+ years mark, it's weird how there doesn't seem to be a definite solution for the number bloat / skill bloat problem in a way that doesn't feel like a "kicking the can down the road" kind of solution.

For FF14 in particular, I would suggest an alternate leveling system, kinda like what we already have with Eureka/Bozja but on a expansion scope.
And for skills... I really don't know, we are already hitting the limits of skill bloat on several jobs. Sometimes I wish they would have stuck with improving cross-classing. I'm guessing a lot of passives are in our future.

I think in an ideal world they'd put a system in place to restore and take away skills depending on your level range and have a little pop up message telling you how you're about to change expansions so some skills will be removed while others will be added - then just restore classes to the way they were during each expansion as if you were playing each one during their expansion release state.
Of course this isn't exactly ideal as some classes have been changed during those lower levels to be somewhat more enjoyable like tanks all having a two-hit AoE combo before level 50, so it's a complicated issue.