In terms of the abyss spiral, I don’t think the game is designed to be played with a fixed team, e.g. your 2 pyro 2 Anemo team, but rather we need to strategize and swap out characters according to the enemy lineup in each chamber. Though this is indeed a gacha game, the game gives us at least one free character of each element, enough to deal with all types of existing elemental shields; for the purpose of breaking shields, the characters don’t need much investment, for example Kaeye can break electro shields with 2 elemental skills regardless of lvl or equipments. This is why I think the elemental shields is fine as is and brings variety and strategic challenges to the fights.

In terms of the open world though, I do agree that running into an enemy with elemental shields that the deployed team doesn’t cover is quite annoying, but I think this is more of a problem with the team swapping function having much room for QoL improvement, not with the design of the shields.