I agree with you on a lot of your points, which you have made very well by the way. Especially that people should play games in the way that makes them happiest. I hope people enjoy playing ffxi and stay in the game lol. I'm not 'down' on anyone. But this game was cherished by many people for being a fairly challenging and stratified game where you earned stuff slowly through effort. Now you can sleepwalk to 99 on a new char, get some online gil, buy ebisu, buy a skillup ring via the RMT mules that sell ranking fish for 15m~ each, which btw they are often selling five or six fish at 100% base min/max weight which is impossible to catch five or six nullpoint fish, you might fish all day for weeks and get two or three fish that are close to the min/max, but I see RMT mules selling bagfuls of min/max weight fish at 15m each and I dont see how they doing that without hacks of some kind. So you can buy ebisu rod, buy skillup ring, buy a gaxe that is twice as powerful as the one used by a WAR who played the job for ten years and he started working on REMs years ago, your AH weap can out-DD him and you can do all this in your new-adventurer pyjamas. You cant really compare that to farming ksnm ODS etc. for a few weeks or months to save up for a SH in the old days.
But really if you are enjoying fishing that is what matters, if you buy your rods or w/e. This thread however is saying basically 'I don't like fishing, will buy lushang/ebisu and want to go afk while fishing anyway coz its boring' which sort of defeats the point of being in the fish guild to begin with imo, which was about travelling vanadiel, seeing the sights and having fun catching different fish and relaxing and stuff, doing the fishing quests using persistence, while also obtaining ingredients for your cooking at the same time.