If you don't want to pay for clears make a group of people capable of tackling the current content. You'll have to incrementally improve your gear from lower level content before you can take on things like WoC and Kirin but absolutely no one is impeding you from doing so. To be honest I have more respect for players capable of clearing content on their own than those who pay for clears.
I'd say getting clear for high end content has more to do with your connections(and people skills/leadership skills), and less to do with personal playing skill. Don't get me wrong, personal playing skills and gears are still important, but the community tend to overestimate the importance of personal playing skill and gear sets, and underestimate the importance of people skill/leadership skills in FFXI.
Back when legion and pre-ilv delve was was the hardest content, I tried at least 2 different LS/hybrid LS/circle of friends PUG until I got my Mul/pre-ilv delve1 clear. My personal playing skill/gear didn't change at all, but with some groups it's slightly easier and some groups are so much harder, even though every group uses the same strat and had same lv of gears. Those successful groups tend to have more trust between members and leaders, they can tolerate mistakes from other members and they don't ***on one person if one person make a small mistake. They also have 100% trust on leader's judgement instead of spamming /tells to leader by asking for different strat.
And the less successful ones, such as PUG or hybrid LS group, or group with small circle of friends, tend to have very little trust between leaders and members, and they're unable tolerate failure or pt members making very small mistakes. The result is that the overall party performance decreased even if every member has decent gear/skills.
tl;dr: if your LS isn't big enough to at least fill up the key role of the party, it'd be incredibly hard to do very high end content even if you /shout for well geared people and filter out undergeared players. Most of the time it really has nothing to do with personal play skill nor gear set level, but more to do with leader's ability to make the entire group stick together.