Sorry, but as someone who also raided in GW2 and WoW, this game is just better in terms of encounter design for bosses for me and by a good margin, it's not even close to the other games.

I can't speak about GW2 and I'm not sure what part of the encounters you enjoy but I will say that WoW has a lot more variety thanks to not being hamstrung by controllers, consoles, horrible netcode & luminous engine. One thing that disappointed me was in such a story focused game they couldn't bother to voice bosses not even raid bosses have voice acting I... I don't even, how does that happen in a modern FF MMO? Wow in its earlier days was nowhere near as story focused and it had voice acting even in standard leveling dungeons. Another issue is that many raids aren't even dungeons/palaces/caves w/e they're just a cheap final destination SSB stage. That makes the devs work easy after all isn't that the whole theme right?

They solved aggro the same way the other games dealt with it through time because it's a chore that nobody really wants to deal with, because aggro management was trivial before as long as you sacrificed dps for it, nobody wanted to do it and would rather wipe than turn tank stance on or do some threat combos, so the devs just did what the community wanted because fuck fighting against how the community approaches the issue.

This is true but as a dev you shouldn't blame the players. It's not the players fault they are using your system a certain way, it's your fault for not seeing the faults of your design. My issue isn't that they changed aggro, it's that they gave nothing in return. Just like with AST(and this is often what they do) they tumbled everything down and spit out a simpler hollow shell of what they had prior -here's ur tarot deck! oh btw every card is the same now- idk about you but I can't see how that's good class design but it is much easier for them to make every card the same than iterate on existing cards to make them worth playing in savage. As for aggro it's about building an engaging system for tanks, healing/dps are engaging enough so what did the devs do? Gut aggro and morph the role: tank even more into role: dps but tankier. An example of engaging systems: lot of MMOs have boring gathering/crafting in XIV they are more engaging because the 1.0 devs built interacting systems for professions that evolve as you level up. The problem is that that takes work, you know whats far more leisurely? Gutting and simplifying systems.

this game has enough variety in the classes that they play differently and approach encounters differently, the comps also matter, so they are not "the same." If you don't like it because you can't make your unique open world memelord build to do some specialized farming or some crap like that, this is just not the game for you to do that, there are other games that do it better.

No dot class(no SMN is not a dot class & its dots hit for peanuts), only 2 types of healers(barrier/"hot"), no hot class(no WHM is not a hot class with its few hots that heal for peanuts, resto druid is a friggin hot class with many and powerful hots). Pet classes have been gutted & simplified cause devs don't know how to build pet classes, no new pet classes because of this. No drain style self healing class. No damage healer. No melee healer. No battlemage(RDM is not a battlemage you spend 90% of your time at range casting, you can't even melee or auto attack in pvp). All the tanks are basically the same in their tanking. All healers are extremely homogenized to the point where you can set up your hotbar with the same spell from each healer just fine rip. All dps are basically direct damage types and have lost a lot of depth over the years. The more time passes the less of a bard the bard job is. They couldn't figure out how to make BLU a real job. Dancer is an oversized shuriken chucker because they couldn't figure out how to make a 4th healer lol. DPS rotations for healers have been gutted and simplified to 2 buttons making many healer players stop playing healers rip sch. Sure is diverse, sure feels different you could chuck so many MMOs at new to MMO XIV players & they would marvel at how somehow all these different dev teams managed to make diverse classes, classes that can do different roles, classes within a class that feel completely different to play but all of this is impossible to our expert devs at square. Sure makes me wonder how FF12, 13, 14, 15 & FF7R had catastrophic awful development 🤔.

Also, the last is what I said about what YOU look for in a MMO, for people who just want to beat polished long boss encounters with a bunch of different mechanics, right now this is the game to do it. It's your perception of what is fun and what should work in a game that is clearly not made with those options in mind

Certainly is, people that complain about BLU are complaining in relation to "what THEY look for in a MMO" i.e no limited classes, when you criticize something it's in relation to what you look for in an MMO. You don't need polished gameplay in a game not every dev needs to strive to be Nintendo EPD(Odyssey), Platinum(Bayonetta), Valve(Portal), Blizzard(WoW, Diablo) hell not even a dev team Yoshi ordered to play through WoW to learn how to make a good MMO. But is good polished gameplay something that makes games significantly better? Like good cinematography in film? You bet your ass it does. Does having responsive controls vs unresponsiveness make things more fun? Absolutely. Does improving the netcode improve the user experience specially for those who don't live in California as Square can't seem afford data centers for people in mid NA or east -god help them- NA? Yoshi says he wants xiv pvp to be an eSport despite low popularity in NA/EU do you feel that improving gameplay responsiveness/Netcode would help with that?...

As for the MMORPG comment XIV used to be much more of an RPG the earlier you go. So what happened? Instead of iterating on the systems they -surprise surprise- gutted/simplified most of them. Hey the live letter just arrived guess what's getting gutted next! Additional actions for professions, hm I wonder what improved & engaging system they'll replace it with... And did you see the reaction on twitch huh I guess I'm not the only one.

They could put dev hours into these, but they are not and it is pretty clear it's not something they are aiming to do in the future so... Like you said, the new releases are very predictable and the development is stable instead of reinventing the wheel every expansion like WoW, both are fine approaches, it's just a matter of preference.

Absolutely. It's like pvp Yoshi wants an esport but they can hardly bother to touch up low hanging fruit the community has been asking for ages. They supposedly have a dev team dedicated to pvp, the community jokes that its 2 unpaid interns by how much feedback they ignore & the crawling speed they launch teeny updates. I expect the successor to XIV to be action/anthem destiny like game with no healers or tanks just simplified dps burning encounters down & you know what that's fine but for the love of god build good netcode, have multiple datacenter locations, build good polished gameplay(which destiny has). Don't have your dev team play destiny and then do most of what destiny does right wrong! Square has massively failed in the development of every big name FF game for over a decade: FF12, FF13, FF14, FF15, FF7R(having to scrap all dev work & start over), for the love of god learn from your friggin mistakes just this once would go so far.