If you guys spent half as much energy actually debating your points instead of getting into pissing contests with people who disagree, we'd get much further here. The last few pages of this thread has gotten pretty cringe, ngl.
SE is always pretty averse to listening to feedback if it comes from a place of overt negativity, YoshiP has said as much. Let's be honest with ourselves here: Despite the game's issues, this dev team actually seems to care more about what we think than most other mmos out there right now. Take a look at WoW and it's history, since that's XIV's primary competitor. If you've played that game for any length of time, you know how it is over there. They'll release a new expansion, but during the beta test, a huge swath of the player base will notice many glaring issues that are going to cause problems long-term. The player-base tells Blizzard about these problems, repeatedly, pleadingly. Their response, 9 times out of 10, is to leave things the way they are because the developers are ridiculously stubborn over there and think they know better about what their player-base wants, than the player-base itself. Then 2 years later, they do a developer live-stream talking about the next expansion and how they're finally addressing all the problems we've been screaming about, 2 years late. This cycle has repeated itself in pretty much every single WoW expansion I've taken part in. SE at least seem to hear our feedback and endeavor to do something about it much quicker than their competition. They seem more engaged in the back & forth discussion between dev team and player-base.
I'm just trying to find a silver lining here, as I'm definitely not a shill. XIV has some serious issues right now, most of which, in my view, stem from this game's content release "framework" or "formula". It has grown entirely stale. They are so fundamentally RIGID on this content formula they've been using since pretty much ARR. The Variant/Criterion Dungeon is the first step in expanding this game's horizons a bit, but it needs to be adjusted and it needs to be tied into the main gear progression pathway as far as I'm concerned. The savage content especially should be. The good news is that the dungeons award tokens, meaning that we can save them now in preparation for further rewards to be added to the vendor. Which needs to happen. TLDR: I really just think CBU3/SE need to start thinking outside the box MORE in terms of the content "formula" this game has relied upon for a decade now.