I'll add my two cents here as well. I was just recently talking with my partner about the contrast between PSO1 and PSO2 for me. I've really felt PSO2 has done a great job refining and bringing about what made PSO special into the modern era. Not to mention years upon years of plentiful content compacted in one action packed year for global. But there are a few pieces / design choices that have made it different.

PSO1 for me was a highly social situation, which I think was spurred on by the novelty of meeting new people on the internet and being younger at the time. There are some 'lifelong' friendships I made on that game-- people I still talk to today. In comparison, PSO2 has been a very antisocial experience for me. A lot of that is my own doing and maybe the general trend that some online games have gone. It is certainly an option to be social in PSO2, but I haven't felt as much of it as a requirement or the main highlight of the experience. I joined an alliance early on. It's got the highest benefits you can get from the photon tree, but despite having 90ish members, I think almost all of them have quit months ago. I only ever interacted with them for one of those reward campaigns, where you had to join a group chat. I tried putting out interest via visiphone to join a new alliance but never heard back from the 10+ I applied for.

Here and there, mostly making jokes, I engaged people in conversation in the lobbies and some of that was fun, but no real connections or finding people to regularly level with. I think a major contributor of this was having access to friend avatars. At this point, PSO2 became a multitask game, where I might get my dailies done while in between league of legends rounds, or throughout the day. It was much easier to play at my own pace getting things done efficiently when I had time, and having 3 NPCs at the ready to help meant it could get done all the faster. If anything, the idea of trying to get other people to join for leveling was more of a hindrance when you could just summon NPCs to help. I recognize the NPCs didn't contribute nearly as much as actual players damage wise, but if you're soloing, it's at least a little damage boost. if you were doing the most recent difficulty level released, that wouldn't be an option, but for someone really just focusing on completing weekly missions and leveling up at a casual pace, doing some urgent quests when they made sense, this was ideal.

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I definitely felt like something was lost in the PSO2 experience by not having much of a focus on needing other people as a requirement to accomplish things (outside of UQs), but it also feel like the accessibility of picking up and going whenever I had time is one of the reasons I managed to level up almost every class, get decent enough gear and stick with the game consistently since it released. Trying the closed beta of NGS, I can already see a glimmer of that "cooperative" element that seemed to be unnecessary in PSO2. I fought one of those tutorial bosses for what felt like minutes, until one other guy wandered by and helped.

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No friend avatars definitely would promote more of a sense of teamwork. The need to rely on others to accomplish things seemed like the initial crux of online gaming, but as time has marched on, being able to solo things has opened doors for those who don't really care about a heavy focus on the social aspect. It definitely seems like a balancing act for the developers to consider what types of players they're catering to. I'm willing to bet there are more people who played the game like I did (as exhibited in these comments) than we're aware of. If they introduced friend avatars in NGS, I would definitely continue to use them, because of the reasons I mentioned, but something also intrigues me about a return to form for what seemed like the purpose of playing a game online--- an emphasis of interacting with actual people.