Should XIV add more end game combat content.

[Jojoya]

Actually, we do. Yoshida has outright said that roughly 95% of Ultimate is entirely reused assets, which means they have extremely high return on investment given how much viewership and attention they garner. Considering they decided to add onto them with a new boss model and arena for the final phase starting with TEA, it's clearly a worthwhile endeavour. Although, it should be noted both Dragonsong and Omega have no new music added, thus subtracting a pretty hefty cost.

Naturally, they still take time to develop but the cost itself is extremely minimal based on Yoshida's own comments. Hence why whenever someone brings up Ultimate being a waste, it's eyerolling.

Yes, and no.

Cost for production of new assets for the encounter are comparably low because they're reusing assets from the original encounter (probably mixed with assets from other instances). But there's still the cost of the developers that are merging the old assets with the new, designing the encounter mechanics, doing the QA to make certain the elements are functioning as intended and finally doing the actual fight testing.

YoshiP has the latter is done by developers who normally have other assignments and have to be pulled away from those tasks when testing of the encounter is finally ready to begin. He also said that testing takes much longer for an Ultimate than it does for other instanced encounters.

I wouldn't call the costs minimal but they would still be less than designing an entire raid from scratch.

Even if I never do an Ultimate myself, I don't consider it a waste. It has its place in the theme park same as the everything else and it works well as a publicity tool in attracting attention to the game, bringing in more players.

This game needs a completely new structure for the gear treadmill to make new endgame content worthwile.

That's an argument that could be made of most MMOs. Does the gear treadmill really hold up after all these decades or should different reward systems be the carrot?