Nice work OP, and I agree, but on these boards the white knights will never ever accept any realistically achievable metric for FFXIV not being near-perfect, or at least any complaint being invalid.
Even if SE would use an ingame poll and published the results, the white knights would go "casuals dont take that poll, they dont have the time or just click away", or "people happy with the game wont do the poll" and dismiss any criticism.
At this point, this has gotten toxic to the point of being laughable, and I just ignore any opinion that basically says everything is great because you cannot prove, to an arbitrary level of confidence, that its not.

ShB did a lot of things well on its initial release, but both lifecycle of the patches and class design are not good, and its starting to show. The playerbase, by all metrics we have, is shrinking faster (please, white knights, tell me how this is due to the game being older, people not playing being intended, or that its normal even though it didnt drop that much around the same time in HW or SB) and getting more inactive, and looking at the ingame tools for activity (PF, queue times) nothing is really working.

I main GNB and SAM, and got lucky, but I shelved my MNK (in favor of SAM) due to the bad design, and DRK in favor of GNB because the dumbing down of tanks for no reason at all was just painful.

I swear, SE thinks most of us cant even hit 4 buttons in order.