My Experience With Alexander Normal Yesterday As A Tank

[Noxifer]

No one did.

But rolling up with no idea whatsoever of what you should be doing, in endgame, (on a tank, no less,) and expecting everyone else to tell you is... lazy, at my most polite. And seemingly specific to the NA data centres?

To be fair, there are two tanks. In for example A1, it's pretty quick to tell the new tank pointers if it should be needed. For Faust, either 'take him, hold him, ignore adds' or 'grab all adds, hold them'. For main fight, 'grab second robot, ignore adds, don't point big one towards blue beams'. Unless I've forgotten something important, those are pretty much the only 'tactics' for it. The rest (for a tank) is just 'pop cooldowns when appropriate, avoid aoes, survive, do as much damage as you can' which pretty much should be second nature.
Other fights have trickier mechanics, of course. But still not so difficult that you shouldn't be able to figure most of it out fairly quickly, even as a tank, especially if (as the OP stated he had) they've read a brief guide on the fights. And especially when you have the other party members doing the mechanics.

When I went in the first time, I wanted to go in blind, so I got myself a team of seven other people who felt the same, and we did. The only one we didn't manage to down was a4, the rest of them took just a few wipes to figure out what to do -- with some theorizing amongst us, of course. And even A4, we got to see until the last phase (wiped the last time we had time for at around 20% or so, and didn't have time to go back inside that night).

In the best of worlds, of course, that's what you should do if you want to go in completely blind. Make a PF listing for a 'new people only' run to find like-minded. That way you don't risk getting 'spoiled' about the boss or puzzles/mechanics, and you guarantee that you won't 'hold back' whichever random people you end up with since they'll be there for the same purpose, so to speak (or at least willing to deal with it). But going in semi-blind (as in 'read a guide, but don't fully know the strat') is in my opinion very different.

just wow. is there an issue with this? -.-

It tends to be a general opinion of many, unfortunately. I'm not sure if it's just because of the language barriers, and English-speaking people expecting other people to know English coupled with French-speaking people who aren't good at English refusing to attempt to communicate, or if there are other issues. I know that for me, since my native language isn't English but it's the only language of the four client options that I can speak/write, it's the frustration of ticking only the English language option when I sign up, only to get people with only French or German language selected in their profile (underlined to show their client is in that language), and then trying to not only agree on tactics (which DPS goes where, which tank takes what, things like that) but also sort out any problems in case of a wipe. And even when you get members that have English selected in their profile as a language they know... as long as there's at least one other that has their native language selected, it often happens that those communicate only in their own language, ignoring that the rest of the party only have English selected in their profiles... While I get that you're usually more comfortable communicating in your native language, it's still common decency to speak a language that everyone has in common, isn't it?

Right, but by watching the video (using your example), you learn that meteors cannot be placed any closer than roughly 10 yalms from each other (which is conveniently the distance of Cover) or they will explode. You also learn what "Stardust is", and what to do when you have a red or yellow mark above your head instead of running around frantically. Since you already know this, it's a lot easier to shift from the strategy you saw to a new one. Going in COMPLETELY blind makes players have to explain all of this to you before the group is ready to discuss strategy.

Which is very true, and I'm not arguing that part =) But you can still get bashed/flamed for knowing the 'wrong' strategy. And somehow, if you say that you're new, but you watched/read a guide, some people expect you to magically know all available strategies ^^;