Grinding "use" to be part of the charm but now we live in a world of farmville and all those instant gratification games that if people aren't being rewarded right off the bat they'll complain about it. Just look at the complaints towards the relic weapons perhaps the most challenging thing yet not as challenging as obtaining the relic/mythic from XI.

Browser based games and micro-transactions have tainted a good amount of gamers that use to play for fun and enjoy the community of it all and in an MMO a community is everything, without that you only have a shell of a game.

In something like swtor a community wasn't needed til end-game and even then there wasn't enough content to do with said group. Sure they had flashpoints which you could do to lv up and play with 3 others but overall said content wasn't needed to "experience" the game when you could just as easily level solo through the storyline and sidequest which were offered.

While the same could be said for XIV compared to swtor in it's current state XIV's content is somewhat more varied.
-A decent variety of NM(granted not the most challenging but respawns aren't ridiculous)
-dungeons (time based which force you to progress through them fast in order to complete them)
-Primal Fights (Boss instance without the dungeons)
-AF quest (Content which requires help from other to complete at later stages)
-GC quest (content which requires help from other to complete)
-Caravans (content which requires at least 7 others to get a decent payout)
-Relic weapons (content which requires a wide range of skill and luck to obtain as well as a good community)

That's all I can think of atm. When you compare it to SWTOR they have
Flashpoint(4 person event which is repeatable and can be done at own leisure with no penalty for taking your time. So someone with a lot of time on their hands can pretty much clean out the flashpoint before leaving, and since one person can enter a flashpoint by themselves they can just as easily use said instance to farm items for credit)
Story mode(solo adventure)
Side quest(large variety which can be done solo with only a handful that recommend a group rangin from 2-4)
Operations (instance event which can have from 8-16 in it, works in the same way as flashpoints.)
PVP (events usually pitting again on an 8v8 setup however horribly imbalanced)

But ya, SWTOR issue falls from imbalance and lack of a wide variety of large grouped events because of said imbalance. If they were able to balance classes properly as well as offer a wider variety of content for players to do then perhaps it would have faired better.