My feeling is that they tried to break down the gameplay and stick it in different areas. What they need to do is make all the things they do a part of the main experience. Take Bazja for example and the flexibility and craziness they had with the additional skills and world encounters: The mechanics that were found there would have made the overworld a ton more interesting than just a thing to traverse, which is all that it has become most of the time, now. They've kept map runs, fates, and hunts in, but they got too big into balancing things perfectly for some reason with overworld content that people currently rapidly out gear.