Honestly...a lot of this is the community, not the game. You didn't need to keep up with your gear or whatnot in ff14 because the players didn't care / require you to have the best at all times, or require you to be 10 ilvs higher than the content requires. With the wow people migrating to ff14, I would not be surprised one bit if this mentality gets brought over to ff14 too. I haven't played in awhile so I guess I'll see for myself how it is in the new expansion.
Ofc at the very high levels (world first), you should be keeping up with everything, but this toxic mindset trickled down to even the casual guilds who couldn't clear the raid even after 7 months. It was really sad.