It's honestly ridiculous!
Why should we not have an option to obtain what our older characters have currently?
It makes no sense to expect us to aim for the Black Mage badge knowing darn well 99% of the player base will almost never touch that content let alone even get to 250.
Yikes OP, can you fix that formatting in your post?
Or at least a TL;DR...?
Either way, pre-BB wasn't as fun as you make it seem. It was mostly grinding and if you didn't party up with others you weren't going to be able to do much as it was.
Not everyone wanted to be with others to level constantly. Some of us enjoy soloing too.