They either need to tone it done so people don't have to luck out by finding a random group or improve the rewards for public instance so veteran players have an incentive to run it and thus help out the people that need to complete the story.
And for the people that tell others to just get gear or change classes or whatever.... please, it's totally unreasonable to require a particular type of gear for just one instance of an episode in the whole story.
Who knows how many aspiring players were driven away by this horrible obstacle which is zero fun without a decent group which is very rare these days.
Finally, I have no complain about the tower and its inherent design itself, it just shouldn't be placed as an obstacle in a story like that.
A very easy and simple fix would be to allow players to run a private squad for the story too. I'm not saying that's the exact fix Anet should implement, just showing how easy it is to fix this issue for good.