Thanks everyone for your help, I will throw a few likes around when I am off my mobile.
The change to STR and vit is new, that is really helpful to know, one last question, is parry useful now? Wasn't considered that helpful when I stopped playing (pretty much around when HW was released)
The Parry stat is more useless than it's ever been. They actually admitted some months ago in a Live Letter, or some broadcast like that, that Parry is not a useful enough stat and they're aware of people avoiding it as much as possible. In other words, they're saying, "Yes, we know it's functionally broken. We'll look at it for Stormblood, not now. It's okay if you don't get gear with it."
Also, just to expand on the STR and VIT change: Each point is now 0.45 AP. Although gear does have slightly more VIT than STR, this did indeed result in a slight reduction in tank damage, so they boosted enmity generation on tank stances to compensate. Overall, I greatly applaud the change. However, there is a downside: Flash and its equivalents are now nearly useless outside of tank stances, albeit they were always fairly limited in enmity generation outside of tank stances even before.
As for Anima weapons, except for one stage, the grinding doesn't feel nearly as bad to me as most of the Zodiac stages in ARR. Then again, it also feels uncreative except for that one very grindy stage. By their nature, the Anima/Zodiac weapons will be/were always the best weapons once they reach the level of the latest raid weapons because of being able to tailor the stats.
When you need Lore, people do Aetherochemical Research Facility non-stop now (yes, the final 3.0 story dungeon) because they boosted the total amount of Tomestones of Lore to 150 in order to motivate people to not leave if they get it in Level 60 Roulette. Unfortunately, it's too good of an incentive and now it's the ONLY serious way to farm Tomestones. Nothing else can compete if the only thing you care about is Tomestones of Lore.