Awesome changes made that weren't there when you started playing?

[tdb]

TP as profession with no use for that.

Everyone used TP for sprint back then. Sprint was reworked somewhere around Stormblood release to no longer require TP.

the weird BONUS chart (what was that for?)

You used to earn points every couple of levels which you could assign to attributes of your choice. The bonus column showed the amount assigned to each attribute. That was removed around Stormblood release too.

Also, they added icons to the emote window and color-coded it (blue for sad, yellow for happy etc.)

I wish they'd also sort the emotes alphabetically. It always takes me a long time to find random emotes for quests when I'm playing on a controller (on the keyboard I can just type the name).