Linear, linear, linear

[Shurrikhan]

Actually, this is exactly what they used to offer - greater reward-efficiency. Aside from the gear upgrades, someone else pointed out killing one pack of mobs for an item that fetched a very good price on the MB, yet what did we do? Skip it.

It fetched a good price on the MB, for the one person who looted it, for about two weeks after ARR's release.

What's extremely telling is that nobody making this claim of "offer something better"

They have, though: better rewards (i.e., ones that are actually rewarding to more than just those with gear worse than what the dungeon offers) on those side-paths, and for those side-paths to be at least roughly as interesting as the main path and not require the party to simply double back to the main path anyways. I.e., don't utterly half-ass them if they're going to be put in. Not that difficult a concept.

We've also seen even simpler ideas like "forks" or "larger sub-zones/rooms" (where, yes, one route may end up preferred over the others, but at least the dungeon is thereby aesthetically more varied all without needing to cause any backtracking or even conflict between speed-of-run (favors quicker queues/non-DPS) and reward-per-run (favors slower queues/DPS).

And then there's the simple matter of more apparent variation --just along that route-- to alter the "Just hold W; wall-to-wall" pace of the dungeon and thereby make it feel less linear, be that the likes of the occasional defense segment, scattered mini-objectives, or whatever else.

Wait, so your idea of "non-linear" is to fight the same exact mobs in the same exact order within each "wing", just...you get to choose the order of the wings?

It's a WoW dungeon... A large portion of the mobs will be skippable (yes, even without crowd control / Shroud / passing through the Nightmare Realm), and many of the rooms themselves offer multiple pull choices by which to pass through them. That's true even in their more "linear" ones.

And, no, that's not all I mean. Take the first example above. The only set requirements are that you have to kill the first 3 bosses, in any order, to end the protections around Nokhudon Hold. (In any order) claim the ballistae in order to ground Granath, break the storm totems to end the hurricane around the Raging Tempest, kill the necromancers to break the ritual attempting to bind the fallen heroes.

Apart from that final boss, the order of bosses and the mob pulls around each are entirely up to you, along with which spare mobs to pull to meet the %clear requirements.

In that case, FFXIV already does that with every single raid tier, which once you've cleared them once come in groups of 4 that you can complete for an extra tome reward in any order...

Is this a weird "I don't want loot and/or I don't mind screwing my party over" flex, or are you just not familiar with how Savage works?