If someone were to ask me "what's FFXI to you?", the Wings of the Goddess era would be my answer, and was my peak FFXI experience. The level cap was still 75, you had level sync to smooth the leveling process a little bit (but not too much!), your jobs were fleshed out, you had Dancer(!), campaign was a blast, and there was just so much to do! Abyssea and onward watered down the game a bit for me, to the point where it's not recognizably FFXI to me.

I play on a private server these days, and am enjoying the experience now just as much as I did back then on retail.