The general player base needs to improve

[RiyahArp]

This was actually 2 days after I cleared it, in Stormblood's first week, so I maybe had 1 or 2 i300 dungeon pieces.

Also you're not implying gear = skill, are you?

We all know gear trivializes content, especially if Ilvl isn't capped relatively low. Surviving the center aoe if you are in it, for example, or being able to last long enough with hellfire to be rescued. Shinryu was a healer's fight to win or lose, and if you had a smooth ride, chances are it was because your healers stayed up first, and your tanks second. If any of those four struggled, especially at min ilvl, it was wipe city, and for a while healers struggled till they learned the mechanics of the fight. DPS simply don't impact that fight past the add phase, and it takes 2 or 3 of them being down repeatedly to impact things.

Some players are better than other players. That's how someone can go in and clear him with no issues while others struggle. For story level content, Shinryu was damn hard at launch. He hit hard, he had lots of things to keep track of, was not forgiving of mistakes, and most of the playerbase didn't know the fight. These days people largely do know the fight and there's no item level sync, so successful clear rates have gone up massively. That doesn't take away from the challenge at the time.

This is the problem with forum discussions on this stuff. The average forum goer is not the average player. Lots of players who have a significantly lower skill level and find this stuff difficult are barely represented here at all, while the high end skill level is vastly over represented. That skews things towards "everything is easy and everyone's bad!" when maybe the real answer is "it's not as easy as you think, and you're better than you think you are."

I get too frustrated over this for my own good. I shouldn't, but it's exactly like you said; people vary in skill and ability. What I worry about is that the people who are good will shift the game like they did with HW again, which was a lot worse for medium to lower skilled people, and even high end people too.