Well first of all, about what you said about "should it be a requirement for a 3 year old MMO that to simply have the ability to participate in certain events players are forced to have alts or miss out entirely? " They are not trying to force you to have alts to join the event, the forced you to have friend to join you to complete it. Since they were trying to increase the number of player that play with forcing people to doing team stuff, since with the increase of player, the player that do top up will increase too. Thats the company logic (yes its * logic). The one that join with alts are what player decided by theirself.

And then about "if an MMO has reached a point where people dont want to play it, where they would rather give their details to other people to do things for them, then that is a clear sign that the "game" is not fun and that the company is doing an awful job of incentivising players to * around". Right and wrong, some people just simply quit because they have no time to play anymore, its 3 years old game after all, some people that started to play as college/school, need to start to have a work too, and some people cant do work and play at same time, especially when this game have fixed time daily event. Some people got work at that time and cannot join, thats why lots of people need a pilot to do the dailies. And its happen on every MMO, even the popular one too. Every single MMO have some people that piloted their account.

And you even said about "it should be a hobby to play when you have some free time to spare and for a little escapism, it should not have to be nor should it be expected that we need to treat it like a weird job where we have to clock in and grind for a certain number of hours or else lose access to entire aspects of the game."

Thats what happen on every single MMO, and you are the one who decide if you want to play it as little escapism or treat it as a weird job. The people that decide to play it as little escapism wont even do a pvp match on a MMO and only do pve (which is nearly impossible in here, since this game is pvp focused, but its obvious enough that its pvp focused game during the first gameplay of this game, people are the one who decided to keep playing), and the people that treat it like a weird job is the competitive one.

And what the other dude said is a solution for sure, a solution that player need to take since oasis ignoring most of stuff that player want. And its not defending oasis at all, not even close. What you did is like blaming government for covids and doesnt want to take care yourself to avoid the virus and calling people that taking care themself as defending the government, which is not a smart logic.