FYI just to clarify, when I said pentamelded gear I meant penta-melded Crafter gear which has a completely different set of arguably more difficult to obtain materia.

After seeing some of the replies it definitely seems like there needs to be a better mid tier level because the kind of comments where we start going down the rabbit hole of "it is okay, just when you have to do X it gets bad", it then begs the question as to why X happened to begin with? If the content is really okay content, why do we have so many people with conflicting amounts of time trying to party together and leading to social issues?

That is an honest content design problem and one of the ones that games like WoW did manage to solve, though unfortunately by the time it did solve it the community had already grown toxic to the point of disrepair.