When I played other MMOs, while the holiday events lasted longer, they also repeated every year with sometimes not even having new items to obtain. Now, I'm not saying FF14's events are good. If anything, they've gone downhill since ARR launched. I remember the old events having more than just a single reward and a piece of furniture and required you to do special FATEs or minigames to earn those rewards instead of just talking to a few NPCs and watching some forgettable cutscenes.

I think a lot of the simplifying and cutting things down is due to player feedback. Unfortunately, a lot of players wanted shorter events, easy levelling, and simplified dungeons so that's what we got now. This forum only represents an extremely small part of the playerbase, and those that are unhappy are the ones most likely to voice their opinions.