Savage Criterion
Many people seem to question who this tier of fights is for. And honestly? It's me. I'm currently close to clearing AloAlo Island (Savage). This content is brutal, it's easily equivalent to an Ultimate fight, 24 minutes of constant attention where a single mistake could reset you to 0:00. I have found it so exhausting but the knowledge I will clear it is too enticing to pass up. It does definitely feel similar to Criterion, but the pacing differences with the HP bars, having minor mechanic fails becoming fatal, and having to weave your rotation though 2 add phases & 3 bosses while ensuring you keep enough damage to not hit enrages, is for me exquisitely enjoyable.

Yet I feel like there is a fundamental flaw with this content, and that is its accessibility. It is sync'd to the highest possible iLvl of each savage tier. This means the ONLY way to have enough gear to beat this is if you've already cleared savage for at least 8 weeks (these tend to release 8 weeks after a savage has dropped), been diligently farming your tomestones so you can have BiS on a job, and know that job to an extremely high level of competency. And this is absurdly detrimental to me. There's not enough time to gear multiple jobs, meaning if both your tanks in your static don't want to do Criterion, even if the other 6 did, you'd have to go searching to find someone who could even play with you. If you fail to clear Savage Raids Week 1, you can't clear Criterion (Savage) Week 1, you might not even be able to attempt it. Tomestone gear doesn't even upgrade without Savage until the next patch, meaning you have an extra 8 weeks before you can even START thinking of playing this outside of raids.

I fully get that this content is meant to be extremely difficult, and just like Ultimates they are meant to be for those who are on top. But I haven't been able to try a Savage properly until AloAlo Island because my static was very casual, so I was always severely under-geared. Obtaining gear would harm my static's ability to do so themselves, or give me a tiny window each week to PF and hope I could grab something. I got gatekept out of content I have ended up loving because of multiple different systems clashing with each other. No wonder the playerbase for Savage Criterions is small, you're doing a subset of a subset in an already smaller subset, while not having systems to let people outside of these subsets join in.