Do you like video games at all? Genuinely asking, because it seems like you don't.

@MiraMiraOTW Hell, just in the last week, I was running the Omphalos raid and two tanks were fighting over MT and spinning the boss around--extremely annoying--when our tank asked the other one if they could MT, they were like "yeah sure!" which I thought was a nice change of pace for once, but not even a moment later they said, "it's not like I have better heals and mits and gear and dps" it was like oh so they were just being sarcastic, cool. 10 minutes later a healer rescued their innocent tank into a clump of people mid-TB, slaughtered 75% of the alliance then had the nerve to say, "Hey guys avoid tankbusters/aoes when you can!". I seriously wonder what happened in between post-SH to now, it feels like there's always some dickhead waiting to throw a wrench into the process.

Good review. It's nice to know that there's someone else out there who thinks the formula in XIV is getting worse and shares the same doubts that the developers know what they're doing. I haven't been playing this game as long as you, only since 2020 but right before everyone and their mother bandwagoned, but the massive drop in quality in Endwalker was absolutely glaring.

I remember reading an interview (sorry for the reddit link, all I can find: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/tg7lgz/spoiler_60_famitsu_interview_with_yoshida/) that said Ishikawa hadn't even started writing EW's story until the end of 5.2. I remember thinking, wow, what an incredible thing to admit that totally inspires confidence in successfully wrapping up a 10 year long story arc. And boy, does it really, really show in the writing. The Scions were nothing more than cardboard cutouts that tell you what to do (as they have been for the past 5 years), Zenos was still a shitty Sephiroth (as he always was), and Emet still sucks. I truly felt like I was losing my mind seeing so many people praising EW's story as "the greatest JRPG story ever told", like holy shit please play other games. I noticed the community got 10x worse after EW as people were extremely quick to leap down someone's throat and accuse them of griefing if we happened to wipe in an alliance raid. I remember when 6.whatever dropped and I queued into the not-even-12-hours-old Troia dungeon and the tank immediately put a marker over their head as if they couldn't be bothered to let people wander and, god forbid, make mistakes in a brand new dungeon.
I extremely doubt that I'm even going to bother with Dawntrail, given how they've already deleted the main mechanic of Astrologian and how much I despised Endwalker. Anyway, rant over, thanks for reading.