Lol, I just said that to my wife! She's just finished Heavensward, and it took a lot of "seriously it gets better! But also I played through the first hour of the new expansion and fought one mob. Of three low-level trash creatures. So... but it's good! Really!"
Speaking of Stardew Valley, game dev tells you you can do anything, adds energy system that makes you pass out if you aren't home and in bed by 5PM, immediately adds quest that tells you to talk to literally every NPC in the whole game on day 1.
Homie the other guy is making up bad faith arguments. Lol. You don't have to prove anything to them. Not a single one of their complaints are true or valid.
ARR is such a godawful slog, and I wouldn't pay a penny for the game until you're through it. Heavensward was where I started to get invested. Stormblood is forgettable, but Shadowbringers turned it up again.
The real issue is there's so much filler. It was designed to be played over years (all the end of expansion questlines were trickled in every few months), and when you play them all in a row it can get overwhelming.
They should make like a "Director's Cut" or something, offline version of the game, that removes all of the grindy mmo bullshit and lets people who play single player RPGs enjoy the plot...
Kind of like how they do in Japan with the online DQ games.
There's so little actual meaningful interaction with the game during the main quest that people who don't like MMOs might as well just watch it on Youtube or something. A good chunk of the ARR runtime will be players teleporting and running through the same bit of scenery to the goddamn Waking Sands...
In fact, there's so seldom any voice acting you can just read most of it on the wiki page and just imagine characters nodding and shaking their heads, while the same three pieces of music play over the top of it.
and hopefully moving forward they need to think of an alternative to dumping a 40hr story as a prerequisite to playing the freshest content.
don't get me wrong im not against the ff story but at some point it will literally be "play 700 hrs of solo questing to play with your friends who just recommended you FFXIV"
which leads me to my next point. your friends must find playing with you enjoyable enough. which means that the early game stuff needs a rework as well pressing 2 buttons is just not very fun