The community an MMO caters to is really based on the resources available to the team supporting the MMO and how much that team can shoulder. People want a journey that is worth their time and rewards that are worth the journey to begin with, which is something that FFXIV mostly has handled before this point through the separate communities. The second they opened the flood gates they ran into the problem of the culture being driven by the "best option" for reward vs journey... at least on paper. In practice savage is awful for most players but there's nothing else that is available to compete, so it's either never set foot in hard content and do casual stuff, or do the hard content and deal with the myriad of problems that come with it.

Like the one thing that is weird about FFXIV is that they lack any kind of good cosmetic reward outside of dying gear. No special character effects, no appliable weapon effects, nothing. They rely completely on basic systems that shouldn't be even used the way they are for the reward system and it gets the wrong people invested in some of the content they have.