When i first heard how Final Fantasy 14 was going to concentrate it's effort on the casual gamer, i was overjoyed. Gone were the days of devoting 30+ hours a week to a digital media just to make headway. Gone were the days of going to work during the day, just to return home to start up my second "job". This it seems, was just another one of Square-Enix's empty promises, as many of the recent updates force players to allocate an ever increasing amount of time to receive any of the rewards.

First and foremost, I define a casual player as one that plays less than 15hrs a week, and, for the sake of argument, has limited resources as they never put in an extensive amount of time up to this point to level jobs or build a large sum of gil.

Case 1: Ifrit/Moogle
With an absolutely abysmal drop system, these fights have become a source of great disdain to the casual player. Using the above 15hr/week parameter for the casual player, this would allow for roughly 20 attempts per week at these fights (provided they allocated the entire week's time to these primals). Assuming all were successfully completed, it is still entirely possible to go the entire week without a single weapon drop, or should they get the a drop, there is still a chance that its for an undesirable job, or worse yet, a duplicate.
While this system is said to be changed in the upcoming 1.22 patch, the fact that it has remained for this long, or was implemented in this matter at all clearly shows how Square has no intention of showing any heed to casual players.

Case 2: Dungeons
Dungeons (CC + AV) suffer from many of the issues that plague the above primal fights (just swap weapons for Darklight gear), but have the added issue of having specific job requirements. Should for example, the casual player only have PLD/DRG/MNK to 50, it would be unlikely they could fit into a pick-up run, and would be forced into go with runs with a linkshell. Even runs with linkshells would be difficult as many have set start times for events, and by nature, causal gamers typically are unable to follow such stringent event times.

Case 3: Materia
The materia system requires a large amount of time and money (or an insane amount of luck) to be put into the system before there are actually any discernible results. As it stands now, the casual player would have to either Spirit Bond a massive amount of gear in order to receive the desired materia, or spend an exuberant amount of time farming gil in order to buy them off the auction house. All that time, work, and effort for just one decent set of single meld gear. Now the process begins anew with a whole new set of gear for another class, or should the player feel especially masochistic, going for a double melt set.
Simply put, the casual player is almost excluded from this content because of its very time sink nature. This is due largely by the difficulty to obtain decent materia. Should the casual player find the time to spirit bond a fair amount of gear, the fact still remains that 65% of it (from personal experience) will be useless, by useless i mean has very little gil value, has no practical purpose, or is so weak that its not even worth socketing. As for the remaining amount, 30% will be somewhat useful, either for personal use, or to at least sell/trade for something semi-desirable, this leaves only a 5% chance to get particularly useful/desirable materia. While this is not as much of an issue for hardcore players, those that aren't simply cant allocate the time needed for this, while still balancing out other events, such as leveling or linkshell events.

Ok rant over, this is just my 2cents on how square has alienated the casual gamer demographic.
Just for the record, i would technically qualify as a hardcore player, so many of the above points do not affect me as much.