Why do the bosses/raids in this game feel so lifeless?

[Edax]

I'm not exactly sure how you can make bosses more alive than they already are. Maybe you problem runs deeper than the bosses? Maybe it's something you already know intrinsically but you don't want to admit?

A key problem I had with the original FFXIII was that bosses just showed up out of nowhere at the end of a section, with no relation to the story or the characters. There wasn't even a reason for the boss to be fighting the characters either, but you'd have to spend the next 30 minutes fighting the thing. FFXIV kind of has this problem to a lesser degree, where the boss shows up merely because the mechanics say there should be a boss there. That's one of the reasons if feels so lifeless, like taking out the garbage every week.