I'm kinda in the same boat as you. My days of raiding are pretty much over so for me the endgame for any MMO I play has to have good group dungeon content that is challenging and entertaining. The thing is no MMO (at least the ones I have played) has ever figured out how to combine the best of what EQ1 had with the best of what WoW had. Not even sure if it's possible.
In no particular order:
GW2: No trinity and everyone wants to speed run them.
Wildstar: ridiculously difficult and no one wanted to run them
WoW WoD expansion: heroic dungeons dumbed down beyond recognition comparded to vanilla/TBC era
Neverwinter: never got the chance to play the veteran versions of the dungeons in that game. When I played at launch there were very little tactics used and everything was a speedrun AOE fest.
SWTOR: I enjoyed running the dungeons in this game but there weren't many of them and it quickly got boring running the same ones over and over.
TESO: veteran dungeons in TESO meet the challenging and fun criteria but they suffer from some bad design decisions by ZOS. EXP gain was nerfed hard so leveling up in dungeons is not possible. The first time you run them they give you a skill point but after that there was no reason to run them anymore because loot itemization sucked and you couldn't get upgrades. They added in Undaunted daily pledges which help entice players to keep running them but after you complete your daily it goes back to no incentive to run any more of them that day.
FF14: never played it so can't comment
Rift: had fun running those dungeons but the population was dying away fast the last time I played a couple of years ago. I was a DPS class and the queue times were so long by the time mine finally popped it would be time for me to log out for the night.
If I had a magic wand I could wave, the ideal MMO would have vanilla/TBC WoW's instanced dungeons with boss AI scripts, EQ1's trinity model that required good teamwork and smart gameplay, with mobs that required CCing(mez root snare), mobs that would flee at low health and potentially aggro other trash, and significantly rare loot drops from bosses that encouraged players to repeat running the dungeons.
Im beginning to think the new generation of gamers don't really care much about the PVE dungeon crawl experience, the devs know this, so they don't bother with designing quality dungeons anymore for the old school crowd.
