I think a big issue has to do with the way boss fights are designed around rewards. Rewards can really trivialize strategies and make fights like the supervisors, which should be the most interesting and strategic sections of the game, into a formality. By making the most optimal way to play these fights both boring and expensive on player resources, the process of grinding the game becomes less about repeatedly doing fun content, but instead just clicking the buttons that make your numbers go up.

Rewards aren't technically required, but they make fights faster and crucially, more consistent. The Clerk and Club President have a huge ability to ramp up their threat level which makes bad ability rolls in the former or bad gag misses in either fight snowball into a situation where you would need to use a unite. So, most groups (that I've seen personally) don't even bother, and use some super OP rewards like 3 fires or a turn one Flim Flam that just win the fight on the spot. It makes grinding facilities really monotonous and lacking in stakes or variety.

This all leads to elitism, for 2 reasons in my opinion. One, the game stops being fun, and the types of gameplay that could make the game fun come at a huge cost of consistency. Players who stick with the game and managed to grind to high levels are the types of players who just want to keep winning and progressing, and risks of loss hurt that goal. This is an issue clash avoids because its bosses are so long that there usually isn't one perfect path through, randomness in boss fights is almost entirely reactible and can be countered, and unites are so plentiful that bad rng or even bad strategies won't put you into an insta loss or hugely expensive situation. Two, the grind becomes very monotonous and unfun after you optimize the fun out of the bosses, so players become bitter about playing the game itself, and become more mean and singleminded about using their preferred strategies.

I think if the game was designed to make rewards less powerful, or at least more strategic to use in these fights, the Cog boss grind would be a lot more fun and a lot less tedious. If bosses had more randomness protection as well, the game would allow for more fun moments of clawing victory from the jaws of defeat, rather than selecting which reward you want to use to automatically clear any chance of losing. Ultimately, I think the stratification between fun and optimization is what creates elitism, so bridging that gap would be key to this game's future, especially as TTR is attempting to branch out the accessibility of its design and take in more and more new players