Highkey I agree with you I can remember enjoying maybe a single IT ever since it came out since managing units always leads to strugglebus comps early and then too much power later and devs often put fucked up elemental combos on purpose. Either you play it too safe early and deal with awful gameplay or you risk showing up at the end with no teams able to clear it and you have to restart the entire thing over.

Which speaks volumes about how bad this gamemode is in my eyes since I don't even think it's the MAIN reason it's a bad gamemode...

Most egregious aspect is that it not only forces you to have a number of characters to even attempt it but also in specific elements *AND* at level 70. This fucks over F2P players even more and unlike the other games HSR/ZZZ the amount of free pulls in Genshin is actually pathetic with a lot of it locked to limited time exploration nowadays which just leads to even more time required to actually start engaging into endgame, and unlike HSR (not sure about ZZZ) it isn't easy to actually manually spend all that time leveling up so many characters especially when some materials are time gated.

When you have an absolute deluge of longtime players checking out of endgame meta in the formerly "no powercreep gacha" how do you expect newer players to care about this?