The Formula won't change

[Absurdity]

Which era of dungeon design do you like the most and what do you think modern ones are lacking? Sincere question, I always thought dungeons are pretty even all across the board.
I don't remember which patch it was but they modernized a lot of the older dungeons from ARR by removing some things that were confusing or drawing out the length of it, did you like those changes?

The dungeon design in XIV was never amazing, but for the last 3 expansions it has been the exact same copy+pasted formula of 2 trash packs -> wall -> 2 trash packs -> boss -> repeat, with nothing but linear corridors connecting you to the next boss arena.
They're all essentially the same dungeon with the background scenery swapped out. Just look at Grand Cosmos with the big open garden area, but you're somehow still shoehorned into a bunch of corridors by invisible walls.

As clunky as a lot of the ARR dungeons ended up being, at least they were experimenting with different ideas and gimmicks. Boss mechanics have slightly improved in Dawntrail from the tired old "spread/stack, chariot/dynamo, dodge cleaves" song and dance while you whack the boss, but the actual layout between bosses has stayed exactly the same.

If it were up to me I would open the dungeons up a lot more, design the layout like a place people might actually live in, with open areas, alternate paths and optional bosses.
Give those a chance to dop housing items, minions and maybe even rare mounts to incentivize doing the optional ones, but allow people to just rush to the end if all they want is the quick roulette bonus.

For context I still consider Blackrock Depths in vanilla WoW to be the best dungeon ever made, something Blizzard themselves have never quite managed to repeat, but that's partially because they shackled themselves to the mythic+ system so all dungeons need to work with it.

XIV doesn't really have that restriction and if one dungeon takes longer than the others in the pool (for expert as an example) just increase the rewards you get from it, they were already able to do it with Praetorium/Castrum before the rework.

We had these last expansion and almost no one did them. Lmfao

The problems with Criterion are myriad. The extreme jump in difficulty compared to the normal variant version, the arbitrary restrictions on raise, the lack of enticing rewards and, at least for me, the fact that it wasn't really a harder dungeon but a bunch of extreme trial/savage bosses strung together.