They have no intention of making normal mode for every hardcore raid, the game has hit the stage where the original team has moved onto other projects or management and the new people who took their place are fans, raiders, etc.
That's why every story since STB/SHB has been "what if this FF game but in FF14 and retold slightly?" with ff2/ff3/ff4/ff9 and why everything is raiding and pushing people to raid.

The devs are hardcore ff fans and raiders who are making the content they want and are forgetting tthat they waren't even the main target audience. Everything they invested into this expansion was to try to make casuals get into raiding but ironically with fflogs and tomestone releasing and becoming more prominent, gat4ekeeping on the high end is worse than it has ever been.

They made a mess because they want casuals to become raiders and savage to be core content for 50+ percent of the game, but raiders do NOT want casuals in their groups learning. They want fast PF clears and to clear in a static with friends, not to babysit as a casual slowly learns their job.
Chaotic and Forked Tower were supposed to be an entryway but they are the most gatekept content we've had in a long time with chaotic groups checking tomestone for "passport" and forked tower requiring a long application process to discord servers to be allowed to instance into it.

I don't think they'll even be able to turn this around in 8.0, that expansion is going to sell like cheeks and have the same issues of being designed top down for hardcore players and scraps for everyone else. UNfortunately this is how a MMO dies since casuals are your bread and butter and fund the game and the dev team just took on a fuckload of extra costs and responsibilities so they're screwed if they can't get revenue up.

>>280587776