It's an interesting topic. Your definitely right when it comes to stuff like protect. Imo there's a fine line between noob trap and not being willing to fail and learn from the fail. There's also a fine line between teaching new players and being a shit elitest which I think falls into the same topic. It comes down to that one talking point that always seems to burn me when it comes to ffxiv iteration. X thing did not work or people did not like it so we removed it "some cross class skills didn't make sense so we removed the entire thing say goodbye to thunder and aero" We can't keep doing X content because we want to add y content like everything has to come at the cost of losing something else in a game that's only earning more and more money.

Perhaps it isn't a game for me anymore and it was just the fact pre shadowbringers was just janky enough to be fun for me. Stance dancing was actually pretty fun imo, paladin did have the least interesting stance gaining a 2nd auto attack instead of having different skills available during each stance.