It's become a chore to even log on to the game

[Amyas]

This is exactly my point, they should scrap it in it's entirety. It makes no sense whatsoever killing Ifrit with Fire based spells.

Stop using ARR and 1.0 as examples, use earlier FF games and basically any RPG with elemental affinities and they handle it with much more finesse than this game

Okay, so if they remade blackmage and just had it do elemental damage without the umbral/astral crap, what do you think would happen? "LFM Ifrit EM 3/8 need five blackmages"
That's what they're trying to avoid -_-