While I'm not keen on the fact that the action-centric basis of the game tends to be limited to dodging either, I've got to ask what it is people would actually consider 'hard' in terms of encounters.

I'm not huge on battles being as scripted as they are, but if you remove the 'When X, do Y" sort of dynamic entirely, it seems like all battles would just run together and be similar.
People have said that in XI, battles were hard because "Everyone needed to do their job," but that statement doesn't really mean much in itself. What did they need to do (that wasn't reactionary) that made the battles hard?

And some pages back, it was said that a problem is that beyond having to merely dodge things, the game actually tells you where they will hit, but I'm not sure what anyone would consider a proper alternative. If you just want to get rid of the visual indicators and require people to move based on the direction that the boss is facing, I guess I can see that, but what would you do for attacks that aren't conal or PbAoE? If you remove the visual indicators then there is no real way to dodge or mitigate them.

Personally, I love action-centric gameplay, but I feel the game fell into a sort of half-assed middle-ground in terms of combat mechanics, much in the same way GW2 did (though, while that tends more towards the action-based side of things, FFXIV really tends more towards the traditional combat style). I'd honestly like to see something faster-paced with less of the tab-targetting, single-click sort of skill usage and something more like... I dunno... Devil May Cry.
That said, I'm not someone that enjoys content so ****ing ridiculous it makes me want to rip my hair out as I retry it several dozen times, so if the game did that and it was fun, I would be fine if it still weren't stupidly hard.