I don't know why you think its long past when every MMO including WoW still does it.
How does Wow do it ?
WoW releases content faster than people can complete it half the time so its not in their interest to make it inconveniently time sinky.
Modern MMO's have been going for a more casual style of game play and something like these relics are the complete opposite of that and something out of the hand book of FF11.
Not really looking for people to agree with me though, just stating my opinion
AF weapons were clearly meant to be the relic/mythic version of an item (Or legendary in WoW) where only a few select people with the help of others are meant to get them.
Actually no, AF and primal weapons are more akin to rare items, so that makes Relic more akin to Epics doesn't it ?
Legendary weapons in WoW are completely luck based with minuscule drop rates that's not the same as farming for months, jumping through hoops and then failing miserably because the system is set up to be against you.
The closest thing we have to legendary in this game at the moment is Darklight and loads of people have that so its not anywhere near on the scale of rarity.
It's all about conditioning your player base also, you don't go giving your players easy loot and then all of a sudden raise the bar so high nobody can even see the bar anymore.
People in WoW or FF11 know they will never obtain a Relic/Mythic/Legendary or whatever the equivalent is, but so far FFXIV has been a case of people getting what they want "relatively" easily (primals and darklight being a slight exception but still fairly obtainable) and now all of a sudden they expect us to fulfil obnoxious challenges to get the latest loot, I appreciate that Relics are supposed to be extremely hard to obtain but up until now this game has lacked that.
It's why so many people are crying out about it because there is no middle ground of difficulty its either easy or completely retarded.
No sane gamer would look at the relic challenge and say wow cool that's awesome I can't wait to start on mine, especially if they truly understood the amount of work and luck it required to get it.
Going back to Wow, legendary items are more like "Holy Fuck a legendary dropped", This relic stuff you actually have to be actively working towards and even then luck is waiting just around the next bend with its steel-toe capped boots on ready to kick you square in the balls.
Sorry about the rant I'm pretty passionate about old school loot mechanics, luck based nonsense and ridiculous time-sinks being in modern MMO's.
Why would they base such a huge amount of development time around such a small group of players anyway, I mean who really has time to do this with family, work and real life stuff ?
