FFXIV Elements

I want to take a moment and gather people's thoughts on the strength of elements in XIV compared to XI. I personally found it ridiculous in XI that blizzard and thunder pretty much trumped any other spell in most situations by default no matter what enemies were weak to. That said, I love how elements on XIV are equal by default. Exploiting an enemies weakness is more effective. XIV also allows people to make a build for their favorite elements rather than thunder and blizzard only builds.

What is everyone's thoughts ? Do you like more variety or do you prefer to have only a couple of spells do the best damage?

It was one of the biggest complaints about FFXI.

As far as elements go I'm still stated for Umbral (Ice, Water, Earth) due to THM, and then Earth and Wind tied for highest for gathering. SO when I play conj I do focus on those elements usually. And for THM 80% of my spells will be based on Earth Water and Earth so I'm waiting for that to become more effective. I'm not sure if DDs get freedom of choice willy nilly, but wouldn't people still be leveling up elements based on ws, and spells they use the most? I wonder if this was a concept of xiv, if they wanted us to specialize through our stats and elementals.