That's a very thorough analysis of the relic grinds! I agree with your conclusion regarding the story: It wouldn't make up for this lack of grind, but at least it would be entertaining. As someone who did at least 1 relic from all expansions (except the 6.4 EW step), I was hoping they would use the opportunity to include people from the previous relic grinds and tie the previous stories together. Jalzahn and the guy from the Anima weapons are from Radz-at-Han. Coming up with an excuse for the others wouldn't be that hard. Granted, they announced nothing like that, but when they said Gerolt and Godbert would join forces, and they wanted to go a bit more back to the roots, it sounded to me like expecting some big collaborative work would be a reasonable assumption. Instead two famous guys congratulate each other how great they are and try to become even better in their greatness...?

Personally Bozja seemed to me in many ways like a very good combination of the advantages of previous grinds. You had an own area with story, many interesting characters and fights, like SB, but also options among the usual duties, boosting side content and dungeons a lot and thereby helping with the queues, like HW. That one time grind with the normal raids was the one thing I didn't like, especially after EW release, because that was an unreasonable big amount of things, one time step or no. So I'm not saying everything was perfect, there was definitely room for improvement, but it seemed to me like they were getting there. When they said they wanted to go back to earlier attempts, I thought we might get HW but with the improvements of previous relic grinds. Maybe a choice of 3 side content duties that need a push instead of 1. And this would have been perfectly fine for me. It also wouldn't have required any additional time for the devs compared to now: The duties they could tie it to and could use a boost already exist: Shared Fates, Variant Dungeons, all Normal Raids, optional dungeons,... You could even add Gold Saucer FATEs or Chocobo races to the mix with Godbert involved. xD The NPCs I mentioned above are also all in the game and could be easily repurposed. The relics wouldn't have felt like participation trophies, you would have some fun with the variety of duties you usually don't see due to unpopularity, and the story would have been a slightly chaotic collaborative thing that befits an expansion like EW. Instead they just noped out, made Hildi mandatory for this and added something where the WoL is just a walking coinpurse who happens to be nearby. How is that fun if neither the story nor the process is in any way engaging?