Raid to me is anything above 20 players. That can be subjective of course. Some people consider coil (8 man) stuff to be a raid.
Anyway...

I'd much rather see a larger variety of 4 man (party) content and open world content (that's locked to 4-8 players upon engaging) than raids.
I don't think raids work for this game as well as they do for other similar MMO.