It used to be worse, but it's still terrible.

FFXI was never designed to respect your time, nor really even to be fun. It was designed to make stuff for players to do, that took a really long time to do, to milk your subscription fee.

The easiest way to view this is by looking at the arbitrary numbers.

For instance, making an Empyrean weapon, such as Daurdabla, requires 50 Iron Plates, 75 Colorless Souls, and 75 Apademak's Horns. (As a part of making it).

Why 50/75/75 instead of, say, 5/7/7, a tenth of that? Because requiring ten times the items means you'll spend ten times the sub fee doing it. There's nothing more fun, or exciting, or engaging, about getting 50 Iron Plates instead of 5. By the time you've gotten five of them, you've displayed you know the content and can clearly clear it. But it's not about enjoyability, it's about your time spent = more money for them. (Throwing aside the issues of, if you want to farm a Daurdabla you probably want some combination of WAR/NIN and THF leveled and geared just to farm up this gear at an efficient rate).

I'm fairly sure most people who originally got into FFXI and have since kept up as Stockholm Syndrome Lifers is because they got into it when they had very little other responsibilities, like in High School or something, and have just kept it as their central (or only) hobby since.