There is a lot of conflation going on here. Making something more difficult doesn't mean savage. At the moment everything bar current I guess is making me sleepy, personally. You can literally press 1 to 3 buttons and win. You can stand in most AoEs and don't even require healing.

I agree, the MSQ should stay accessable (whatever that means), but give us options. Playing HW now is mandatory. It's not hard, playing the Alex raids is not hard, there is no incentive to min ilvl and people barely do it anyway. The entire game is like that and it gets 'worse' with every expansion as new players get to wade through even more now. I've had a couple of new players in my FC ask why the game is so easy. A few left around mid ARR. I'm assuming SE gets more players that way and my experience is anecdotal at best anyway. Who knows.

Even if you are 'just' into the story it's just sad you don't even see all mechanics of a fight and the big bad dies within 30 seconds that the MSQ hyped up for 20 hours. That's pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

My solution would be more optional stuff like a min ilvl roulette or a dungeon Unreal or whatever. Put a token at the end for a shiny and people will do it. Or reuse old bosses, give them the Bozja treatment and put them in the open world. Anything, really. I think the important thing is to keep it out of the MSQ so people can trust their way through it unimpeded. Everything beyond that should be fair game to an extent.