Most people are interested in the massively multiplayer aspect of MMOs. Not the endgame consisting of small groups farming dungeons repeatedly. Many who prefer the endgame will simply move back to WoW. It's hard to compete with a game that has had almost a decade to add content and polish. Even many of my hardcore friends who are interested in raids say that the game's strong point is the world and story quests.

Details of upcoming content patches mostly talk about endgame content. And so far, we've seen patches to fix AK speedrunning and queue times, while none of the leveling issues have been addressed.

If things continue this way, i just don't see this game keeping most of its subs in 1-2 months. A lot of people are getting sick of the focus on endgame in MMOs. For those that aren't, there is still WoW or even any of the F2P WoW clones(some of which do more to deviate from WoW endgame than FFXIV).