Long as I've been doing the whole online gaming thing, I'd honestly say it's pretty rare to see devs act in the moment unless it's a bug that benefits players in unintended ways. And while it's easy to proffer solutions or question why they never predicted the outcome of XYZ, it usually does take something pretty dramatic to force action.

Diablo IV is probably the most recent game to get the dubious distinction of being such an unmitigated dumpster fire that Blizzard was forced to walk back certain things and reevaluate their patching procedure. It's still up in the air just how much they're truly "listening" and actually putting that feedback to use, but if I were to compare the game to XIV's current state, it's frankly not even close even if you just try to limit things to the scope of EW content. Prior to D4, most would probably point to Cyberpunk as the previous holder of the title. Suppose I can't really disagree with people on WoW, but I do think age of a game is a factor, too. Go back far enough and XIV's 1.0 would've been top dog at being bad. And much as people try to point to stream numbers or steam charts, they never tell the whole story. Bare minimum, the latter doesn't include PS4/5 users and PC players that don't use steam for the game. No "service" game is gonna have good numbers in a content lull, either, especially with at least 2 popular titles coming out in what's frankly been a pretty stacked year for games.

I can understand the frustration, especially when the game isn't what you want and you want to be having fun in the moment, but things are unfortunately going to be slow for a 10 year old game and could quite bluntly be worse (See: FFXI). Take a break. Seriously. Be it a month, until next big patch, or even until Dawntrail. It's not a betrayal. Unlike some mobile game, XIV will still be here, as it's highly unlikely SE will truly abandon it without a replacement game out and thriving. And to that end, the OP's logic is actually fairly spot on.