It's not casual players who are complaining. It's people who have this conception of FFXIV as being a visual novel with some occasional imput attached to it. They're not for FFXIV as a game, they're here for an experience.

The problem is, XIV is, first and foremost, a *game.* That means things have to have a progressive level of challenge. Later content should be tougher than earlier content, because you've learned more of the game.

The problem is that ShB, and ESPECIALLY EW overcompensated for problems with Heavensward's raid design (it generally takes them about 2 expansions to actually get around to acting on this kind of feedback,) and MASSIVELY overcorrected, simplifying jobs and encounter designs (big asterix here), and it turned what was supposed to be a progression system of "Overworld/Fates>Quest Fights>Dungeons>Normal/Alliance Raids>Extreme>Savage>Ultimate", and essentially shoved the middle of those into the same general difficulty, gutting midcore content. In Shadowbringers and Endwalker, there was no ramp-up from Dungeons to Extremes, because the alliance and normal raids weren't noticeably harder than the dungeons, which, for the most part, were also way undertuned. Shadowbringers Alliance Raids were/are also plagued with problems, mostly due to an overrcorrection from Ivalice, which resulted in mechanically simplistic fights against massive HP sponges. The point being, since Shadowbringers, we haven't had a functioning progression system for content, just a wall that people have to climb over to get from dungeons to extreme.

Endwalker was even worse. Aside from the Tower of Zot, the dungeons don't actually hit hard anymore, especially after you get to 90. The normal raids weren't really any tougher than the story trials, the alliance raids were and are a joke, and the new content, variant and criterion, did absolutely nothing to bridge the gap between casual and hardcore content, because Variant was designed to be done with any number of people, and Criterion was at times on the level of Ultimate. Nothing in the middle.

Shadowbringers and Endwalker were cinematic, and a part of the game where the story really kicked up a notch. Some of these new players, who started with ShB and EW never actually had to get good, the older expansion were nerfed into oblivion by item sync, and it's not like they were going to grind against a wall for Extremes. The problem is, the ones who are saying that "Dawntrail is too hard," were playing a fundamentally flawed game, one that even the developers were saying put them to sleep. Shadowbringers and Endwalker were *broken,* just like Heavensward was, except in the opposite way because they were the overcorrection from HW.DT is the correction from Shadowbringers, and it's putting us back to Stormblood levels of difficulty, which were fairly balanced. That's why so many older players are so happy right now, because the game feels like it's in the right place, gameplay wise.