While I do like not being locked into a separate field area where I can't queue for anything else, a la Eureka or Bozja, in order to grind out my relic stuff, this does feel... not great.

As others have already pointed out, Eureka Orthos released today. The Variant/Criterion dungeons are still very new. Why not try to funnel people into that content?

Heck, why not try to funnel them into ANY specific content to try to keep player engagement up? Wasn't that part of the point of the grind steps on older relics, to keep people running older content so that the queues wouldn't die and newer players could actually get through it later, since people would always ostensibly be working on a relic at some point?

My long-term goal is to have every relic weapon for every class in the game (maybe minus the final step of the SB ones that require BA runs in order to complete). This is what I usually work on in "down-time" between new content patches. At this point, the finish line is somewhat in sight, so to have this that can just be completed very easily is kind of... disheartening? It will give me less reason to keep playing on my main.