New Trust System - Who Will You Upgrade First?

I think all of the lv75 era of FFXI was way grindier and less accessible than today. Game was much different and times were different so it's hard to make a 1:1 comparison but mostly the access to endgame wasn't as "demanding" as some activities today, but access to it was mostly kept at gate by groups (HNMLS) who were basically controlling endgame activities on each server.
This has been pretty much true since game release in 2003 (US) until ~2010.
Everything took insane amount of effort (if we measure "effort" with "time"). Moving around, obtaining anything, even a single level through the loved/hated exp parties and so on.

Then came Abyssea. When it did, it broke several FFXI taboos in what probably was, in their mind, an attempt to make FFXI completely different, squeezed of all its essence to grant players 1-2 years of a different experience for a game that, in their plans, was probably goin to die eventually.
Things went different of course, but Abyssea granted: step by step, accesso to "endgame" to a lot of people, slowly destroying that gatekeeping I mentioned that was kept in place by HNMLSs.
Small groups, multiboxers, even soloers eventually rose up and the game started to accelerate in everything, with a completely difference pace and ratio of effort:reward. You could get max level afk lol, farm good gear and so on.
Some people liked it, a lot of people whined because that wasn't "real FFXI" and so on, we all remember how it went.

Then they tried to slow things a bit with the 90>95 Empy updates and following ones, with Voidwatch.
Things got furtherly slowed down by stuff like Legion (finally offering some challenge akeen to the previous days, after years of "proc" systems).

Then came Seekers of Adoulin, with its new "ilevel" system, which slowly changed all of our gearing paradigms to offer "level up" beyond level 99.
Stuff was tough at start, but slowly things got easier. Sure your average player couldn't solo or lowman Delve, but getting a spot for Plasm was easy and relatively cheap and allowed you to get powerful gear relatively easy/fast.
They added HTBF and lots of stuff.
Point is that not everything was soloable (hardly anything?) but most things were relatively easy and there was a large amount of new gear and items that allowed you to "power up" relatively fast without any huge grind.
Grind remained in the form of RMEA weapons, which finally got updated with the 300 Pluton/Riftborn/Beitetsu.
Was still quite a grind to get the 95 and 99 steps (a lot of people back then still stopped at the 90 level and were using Delve weapons)
They added Job Points too, which were insanely grindy at start (and most people were simply ignoring them) until they added Gifts and gave a different purpose to Job Points making them quite accessible. Grindy but reasonable.
A lot of stuff was in that group during those years.

Then came the 10k Beit/Plut/Rift step and most people thought it was insane, yet it slowly became easier and faster. (and if you were impatient you could "cheat" with RMT, which has always been a thing in FFXI I guess)

All the content that came after was still somewhat grindy but reasonable and you could "cheat" through most of them really. Vagary, Omen, Divergence.
Hardly anything was being stopped by "difficulty" except maybe Wave3 kills at start? Which were necessary to "reforge" your RMEA but, again, you had alternative (altough extremely unefficient) paths, or you could simply "pay" mercs.

Then came Odyssey Gaol, which eventually presented a content that due to several factors was very hard to "cheat" on (altough not impossible) and extremely grindy, but that got partially broken with the Mog Amplifier exploit which never got patched and at this point never will.

The last steps we're getting are Prime Weapons and Sortie, which is again something maybe not particularly hard but not easy either, not very realistic to Merc either, unless all you aim for are Stage4, and those are still pretty strong and realistically obtainable even by average soloers/multiboxers/lowmen.
The same is even more true for Limbus, but again the amount of grind is pretty huge, yet I'd dare to say perfectly suitable for soloers with a lot of time and will and not necessarily a lot of skill.