The only other remotely comparable time gate besides primes is garden, and that doesn't lead to serious endgame weapons (but should probably still be reduced).
I still to this day do not understand why they chose to link Ygnas acquisition to Mog Gardens. It's quite literally in the way just for the sake of being in the way. The fact that it takes so long to get through is the biggest frustration, and many players have skipped this (along with all of Adoulin quests) and don't bother with the HQ ring either. I happen to believe unnecessary time gates
discourage people from the content altogether, rather than prolong the content's life.
I eventually did Mog Gardens after I took a long break (because I had no groups to do things with and a lot of time, so it was there to do). I complained years ago about the model, because it was just dumb. But I don't feel like other people
now should suffer through that nonsense just because I did. Kind of screams of old man "back in my day" vibes.
I'm not advocating for making things easier
just for the sake of them being easier. It's an MMO game, so you should play the game and it's supposed to be time consuming. But content that has been out for a long time that has time restrictions that were appropriate for the time the content was release but no longer, IMO, should be lowered or removed, because it adds back incentive to the player to do it; You're spending time doing something you ottherwise would not vs just ignoring it. You see what happens when they introduce unrewarding things like Shinryu HTBF or Limbus NMs, you get players that ignore the fight entirely because it's an insult to their time. Designing stuff like that for a 20+ yr old game is a terrible idea. And now we're seeing how they "roll back" or "adjust" things that take a lot of time. Evidently, SE realized these time gates are also somewhat unnecessary after a certain point.