When it comes to the topic of relic grinds, we've seen a lot of back and forth between different groups of players: those who feel that the grind is an important part of FFXIV's encouragement to continue playing and/or that the Endwalker relic feels undeserved, and those who appreciate receiving something of value without needing to invest in a huge time sink. And while I'm personally of the opinion that we already have tomestone weapons that fill that purpose currently, I also think there's another way we could go about approaching the relic regardless of whether or not its connected to exploration content, and I want to outline this concept below to gauge thoughts on the matter.

First, each relic step will require some amount of a new item per step. You trade this item into a specific vendor to forge your new weapon. These items can be obtained in the following ways:
1. Engage in the new exploration content in some fashion, where each step is obtained through different methods within the exploration zone.
2. All of these items for each step can be purchased with the following currencies:
- Tomestones
- Bicolor Gems
- Wolf Marks
- Sacks of Nuts
- Variant Potshards
The amount of time required to obtain any job's relic each step is relatively small, even when grinding them out through the exploration content, however, each relic obtained this way is matte, meaning it has no particle effects.

Every relic from each step can be made into a sparkly weapon through a much longer, more intense grind, but there is no stat advantage to the sparkly version of the weapon. It is the same item level with the same stats. The particle effects, in this case, are the reward for engaging in the grind. Now, there may be multiple steps that use the same weapon model, but the colors of the weapon would change, as well as what particle effects are applied to the sparkly version of each step.

If you have forged the sparkly version of each of a job's relic weapons, you will get a special title associated with that job, and each job has a different title as a bonus reward for engaging with the more intense grind at every stage of your weapon, and there can also be one final title if you obtained all titles from every job.

That concludes the summary of my proposition. TLDR: The weapon is easy to obtain, but the grind is associated with giving your weapon particle effects, with the extra reward of special titles for getting every sparkly weapon for a job.