Difficulty format for Normal and Savage will remain in 4.0

[zosia]

Not my playstyle. The majority's playstyle. Midcore/Casual outnumber Hardcore by a wide margin.

do you actually look at the stats or do you just like to assume that since casuals are the majority that there is no need to be diligent?

You do know that even at level cap, you are a minority player? Does that mean that we should cater the game strictly to leveling? No, that would be a dumb way to design a game. I forget the stat off of the top of my head, but admittedly by SE own stats released about 30% of the player base makes up the end game community.

Coils had a 10% participation rate, with about 5% reaching a full clear before heavensward.

That's nearly a third of endgame players that participated in coils. This notion that we are talking about 1% of the player base is ridiculous. If Alex had not destroyed the raiding community, we would still see this similar pattern of participation.

In reality, when raiding was at it's healthiest in this game, close to a third of endgame players were trying coil and many of them were able to actually down some bosses.

Source:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ea-Census-2014
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...e8ff1bcf34c5ae

The more story locked from the majority is bad for business. Better gear, harder content is fine for the elite. Creating story for a tiny minuscule pushing the larger percentage to not ever experience is bad.

It's not locked, you choose to lock yourself out of it, which is perfectly fine. It's your prerogative to choose what you spend your time on, but it does not mean that your choices have to be detrimental to others.

The solo thing doesn't hold water. I don't care if I can solo every single thing in the game 2 years from now.

Sure it does, you don't need to solo anything. You could have gotten 3-4 people together right after hitting level 60 (just a few weeks after HW) and destroyed T1-13.

Raids are designed to be group content, content that is not getting played by most people now. Waste of development.

Again, this is just more of you wanting the entire game to cater to you. This game is full of casual content, you just want 100% of the game's content to cater to you, it's very greedy. Once you take Raiders and non-level capped charters into account, you and your ilk comprise about 25% of the player base, not such a hefty margin to warrant that 100% of the game cater to you. Thus, you should not have everything handed to you on the silver platter, you are not as large of a demographic as you think.