The thing about content and end game go hand in hand. If you focus a game on events/end game content, you naturally cycle the early stuff. If you focus on leveling and grind, then the early stuff isn’t cycled at all.
We can gain evidence on this from any high rate private server (RO being the most prominent example, but elsword has a private server too, as does MapleStory). If you have a high rate, and you need a guild alchemist say, you go and make an alt. Do you need a priest for buffs? Make an alt. But in the low rate, you won’t. It takes 2-3 months just to get the alt functional, then its stats are abyssmally low compared to the player who makes a priest for a priest’s sake.
Thus if players are not cycling old content in anticipation for an interesting end game, its due to grinding being too punishing for the reward. Making grinding simpler leads to more recycling of content, leading to less demand on IMC for r8/9, giving time to fix bugs granted how slow the process is.
Granted for this to happen, IMC really needs to beef up the endgame with more interesting things, PVP, Battlegrounds (i made a previous post), guild wars? (Something more formal than, I FOUND YOU! LETS FIGHT! If i wanted random encounter battles, we can play pokemon!), Raids, etc.