Well said, it boils down to how to please both casual and hardcore players. It's a tricky problem, and there is no perfect solution to it.

In my opinion, SE tries to attract more casual players to FF14 by making the game more casual and soloable. But by doing so, they're losing the core FF fans faster than gaining new ones because they've made the game less engaging in many ways when comparing to FF11.

FF11 was unique in many ways, and I don't want to start another FF11 vs FF14 discussion here. Some may think FF11 was too difficult (hardcore), to some extent I agree but yet it is exactly why it made things memorable even after quitting the game for years. Ask yourself, how many friends you've made in the course of playing FF11 and they've become friends outside of the game?

For example, the genkai quests (yes yes yes I know) were pretty hardcore for many people especially after the NA/EU launch where most of us were new to the game. Yet, when you look at it carefully, it really helped building interactions/relationships between the players and this is exactly what draws people into an online world - you actually want to log in to finish the quest or help others out. However, you don't feel the same in a game designed to be casual/soloable since everyone can do their own thing and thus it's actually discouraging online interactions between players...which is an irony in a mmo.

Of course I'm not suggesting we should forget about casual players. Just like what the OP was saying - there should be fluid progression so that the more hardcore players CAN help casual players to transition to the more hardcore content while enjoying the game themselves.

There are many ways to provide such "fluid progression" and I'm sure SE knows how to do it since this is not their first mmo.