Navel Contemplation: MMORPGs
(I am in a strangely elated mood, likely spawned by a marked lack of sleep - the root cause of which is TV Tropes, that corrupter of souls and harvester of free-time. This mood is marked by gratuitous use of highfalutin words and phrases and a significant spike in my personal evaluation of my own mastery of "humor
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Experience points and loot drops do the same thing: increase your character's standing. XP leads to levels which come with stat bonuses, more abilities, and other resources like area access [think airships, access to travel spells or OP warps]. Loot drops give you most of the same things in different packages. The difference is, as you point out, that many loot drops do not come with a progress bar. Assault gear and CoP rings do, salvage gear has 2 of them [the 3 pieces and the 10 crafting items] where one is itself made of random drops.
Giving away loot that is worth using [there are finite gear slots, so there is a minimum bar] on the first occasion you could earn it is like gaining a level with every equal unit of effort spent leveling. Imagine a world where spiny spipi was worth a level, or where 2 hours fighting in the dunes guaranteed you a hairpin. These things would start to take on an equal value. Since any player should expect and be expected to get these levels [or in our case, equal-effort-prices drops], and each character should get a few hundred of them in their career, they start meaning very little individually and are therefore not worth note - essentially valueless.
Choices in class are largely meaningless when characters can be compared directly to one another; someone is always going to have 'better' gear or a 'smarter' talent tree than another player. This was true in WoW when I asked about raiding guilds and was told my preferred playstyle was not desired, and it's true in FFXI - when was the last time you saw a ranged attack-based NIN or a tanking SAM? It doesn't matter if the popular opinion is right; there will be one and everyone will either conform or go against the grain.
In FFTA2, you certainly do have to grind your little hienie off to get what you want. Main Story rewards will get you one of everything in the shop, but you will want multiple ribbons or warp boots or dual-wield katana. If you want those, you need to grind, gind, grind. The real perfectionist/completionist scale in MMOs is drops, since other people can see them and know you are a badass. In FFTA2, it's the quest log. If you want to complete all the side missions, track down all the chocobos, earn all of the "this quest only" items, or all of the titles, it's grind, grind, grind. There are entire quest chins you need to do 3-5 times before they offer you the end of the chain [and the color of chocobo you see is not guaranteed]. If that's not grinding, I dunno what is.
The MMO player base has proven that they will live in a game 24/7/365 if they have a goal to achieve. Each of those hardcore players keeps a dozen or more other players attending raids, hoping to keep up or ride on their coattails. To give the players the opportunity to decide that they have nothing left to gain from an event is to lose that content; this is counter to the profit model of an MMO. You think casual players would still be playing Salvage, a system that required months of experimentation to simply understand, if it weren't for the ridiculously poor drop rates of Alexandrite? MMOs need tantalizing grape vines to hold large parts of the playerbase together if they want to attain and retain loyal players.
All of this said, I am hoping for the day where MMO gameplay changes from 'do this dungeon X000 times' or 'fight those guys for this castle X000 times.' For now, these models work on profitability scale, since they can be created once and used forever, freeing up content devs [the most expensive part of any MMO's ongoing cost] to make more such content.
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