I would imagine its more that people have done Ifrit so much they are bored to tears of it, although I'm finding more people willing to do Ifrit and Moogle than the new dungeons which makes me sad :(
This just needs to be quoted. SE please focus on how laggy and unresponsive almost all aspects of this UI and game are. I play FF Tactics on my PS3 and I can choose to have my menu scrolling "Fast" "Faster" and "Fastest" as well as many other UI speed changes. I log off FF14 to play FFT a lot and Im always in awe of how fast my input is received and processed.
I don't expect FF14 to play like a solo rpg. But I do expect server, engine, UI and gameplay to be worthy of being brought out in 2013. Currently, I have to say WoW "plays better" then your far newer FF14 SE. I didn't like WoW much. But I won't lie and say it wasn't responsive on a decent PC.
I agree that some of the fights can be pretty simple. Once you know what to do, it's like second nature. Every class has its role, and as long as everyone is up-to-par with that role, the fight SHOULD go smoothly. This is very similar to FFXI, but also to other games as well. Add in a few 'different stages' to a fight, and the fight is a little bit harder.
I tend to play a healing class in every MMO I play, and the dynamic of healing does not change TOO much. FFXI was such a slow-paced healing MMO that I could literally alt-tab between cures (while my character was still casting). WoW was so fast-faced that a lag spike could (and would) be devastating. This is because there are MANY instant heals, and most of the preferred heals WERE fast-casting. I don't know how it is (quit two years ago), but it's a comparison. XIV is somewhere in between. A LOT faster than XI, and somewhat on-par with the speed of WoW.
I have fought Chimera, and while the first attempt led to us running around trying to 'figure out' what to do, the next ones went a lot smoother. It was a fairly simply fight to 'figure out', especially using the tried-and-tested strategy of sticking to the wall, etc. Now the thing I would like to mention here is... this fight technically DOES have 'three' phases. This is unlike most XI battles, where the mob may have a 2-hour (which Chimera also has), but besides that, the fights were pretty much the same from beginning to end. Two exceptions that come to mind would be Kirin (popping mobs at the beginning, but only the beginning), and BCNM fights (where the mob literally despawns and respawns with different abilities/stats).
Has Chimera come far and beyond THAT? Yes, I would say so. If there was no 'safe' place against the wall to stand, this fight would be on-par with all other MMO's you mentioned. There is apparently a 'safe spot' in the middle of the room on stage 3 so you don't get hit by worms... but that would also be easy to navigate to and wait at. What would make this fight HARDER and MORE INTERESTING is if the safe spot moved... randomly... around the room, and people needed to react to this. If you look at the promo videos, you don't see everyone squished against the wall. Basically, this is just terrain abuse people are using because it works, and will continue to abuse because it works. There's no shame in that, because it works, but it does take away some of the challenge.
THAT SAID... My LS has been focusing on Cutter's, and I haven't touched Aurum Vale outside of the short run to the AF room. That fight seems to be a LOT more like what you are looking for in an 'updated' endgame fight.
They should switch to an action system like Tera's in 2.0
I don't think I know the answer, but perhaps this will help, this is all 2nd hand info of course. I believe I remember YoshiP saying they were going to add in a dungeon finder + cross server dungeon finder. Which means more than likely every group will have a balanced number of jobs in it. Sure if you wanna get 8 archers together you can run to the dungeon. If you queue however you will have to have a tank, heals, dps etc. so parties won't have this luxury, for the most part 98% of players will queue into dungeons and experience the content in a balanced party as it was made for. Not exploiting a broken mechanic that is sure to be fixed by 2.0 anyway.
Once we get more jobs and higher jobs under our belts, this crap will more than likely be a thing of the past, on a side note though, this game is so different from WoW and GW2 and RIFT, those games will more than likely not take many players from this game, if anything the marketing team for SE knows what it's doing, they're going at 2.0 full force, i believe they're even shipping hard copies to stores for it though I have no proof of this, just kinda gleaning it from how SE has worded things. In short, i'm glad you made this post, it needs to be brought to Yoshi's attention, but do I think we have anything to worry about? Probably not, but i'm glad there are people like you out there who are making it known just in case. =)
Slow paced MMOs are becoming a dinosaur in the video game world, enjoy them while you can. They aren't long for this world. People want fast action and dynamic combat, because the majority of the growing MMO playbase is tired of spamming our most powerful ability over and over again. There is a reason we have more abilities and faster cooldowns than we did in XI. This game is a constant dynamically changing monster, I hope you're ready.
Some dinosaurs need to stay buried. I realized lots of people enjoyed FFXI and at the time it was a pretty solid game... but we're 10 years in the future and that stuff just doesn't cut it anymore.
If people want slow paced RPGs, they exist in single player form. I just can't really imagine a MMO setting in this day and age that could cater to the slow-paced RPG style without being absolutely boring or wasting a lot of people's time with waiting.