The difficulty of Normal Content in this game needs to increase.

[Amarande]

Normal content should be easy! but would be nice to have a middel ground to harder content (there is a huge gap between them).
Many have a life outside the game and can not spend 8hrs on a game everyday!

This. COVID and WFH only made it even more glaring too since people with cushier jobs got hours and hours of extra play time, while essential workers who still had to go to work basically got pushed out of the community for being "inexperienced."

We're at this point where apparently even dedicating what time you have often isn't enough. No, you're expected to put in more "minning" in RL too, such as ditching other games and hobbies so that you can put your everything into raiding. Not good. I thought we'd gotten away from that after the Old Hardcore Era faded?

The middle ground exists. People just like to say it doesn't coz reasons.

The reasons are relevant, especially when one of them (both WoW and XIV being guilty) is that the default community approach ends up being "okay, it's middle ground content, best practice is to fill the group with high tier players and steamroll it like baby content" which means that actual middle ground players it's meant for still struggle for niche.

Normal content should be normal. What we have right now is baby mode until you reach current content. If anything SE should at least decrease the ilvl cap for every encounter. Rule of thumb, if you can stand in any AoE without needing a healer you need to lower the ilvl cap. Healers are allowed to have fun, too.

You'll need more than that. I'm not actually sure this is solvable within XIV's constraints.

Healers still won't be able to "have fun" outside of baby mode, because the punishment debuffs make the natural "welp, he zigged when he shoulda zagged let me patch that up" flow impossible (especially now that Damage Down has had to come into play in a game that relies HEAVILY on time limits to provide challenge).

Without the punishment debuffs, however, DPS would (again largely because of said time limits) likely just try to stand in fire as much as possible to optimize output, which is also not exactly fun for the healer ...

Criterion on the other hand is just absolutely worthless by default, and no one should even waste the time with it until they give it some kind of proper reward structure.

Sad cynical thought: I've been beginning to get the thought there is a very real possibility that cooperative multiplayer (outside of its competitive aspect) was an experiment with a finite lifespan. The goals of long term replayability (which you need in order to supply enough team mates for the newcomers) and a reasonable rewards system seem to increasingly pull at each other to the point of tearing the whole thing apart.

What constitutes midcore is determined by the quality of the players, not the sensibilities of those of us that can already do the content. And hoboy, does this player-base suck.

Eh. It doesn't suck as bad as people say, IMO. This one lies on SE's shoulders: when so much content is designed so that just 1 out of 8 people who doesn't get it means the whole endeavor is moot despite the efforts of the others, you're easily going to feel like more people are bad than actually are. (I ran the math at one point. Assuming 8 people selected randomly, it takes surprisingly little of the overall pool to fall into the "potato" category to make it odds on that at least one of the eight will be: less than 10%, in fact. So the vast majority of the players can actually be gud and it will still easily feel otherwise, especially with the limited filtering PF allows)