Its hard to explain what Shadowbringers was ... a high-end budget version, with a lot of questionable moves.

Shadowbringers was once again tame ... no one (really) died that was important to the player. Which is a ongoing trend of "everything will be fine" which takes out the treat of the story and makes it unbelievable and yes I'm aware its a fantasy story but it still makes it unbelievable on a fantasy level.

My main problems were:

Story, throughout the entire MSQ the game pushes a narrative of "darkness is not always bad, light is not always good" which is a great flip of the story and then just goes completely 180 at the end "darkness bad again, you are the light", imo the 5.3 boss and the 5.0 boss should've been swapped, now of course the story would've needed tweeks as you cant simply change those 2 bosses and nothing else but i feel like a Light based final boss which we as the shadowbringers fight ... would've nailed it better.

Music, while mostly nice can be put in 2 sections, "recycled" and "we fall". 2 Trials had either a remix of the dungeon boss theme or used it straight. The weapon trials are recycled music, Nier is ... Nier, Eden is a lot FF8.
Noteworthy: Soken was really sick so i can understand this, it however can be felt.

Fights, did we need 5 Versions of Shiva? Yes they are alternate versions but it felt like a LOT of stuff was reused from other FF games or FF14 itself, which is not bad but Eden was basically just rematches, and the weapon trials yea ...

Lack of deep dungeon, they did address this and seemed surprised players were missing it, the missing exp was added to Bozja so that was not lost

Relic was added to late and even missed stages, we jumped over the 2nd to last stage which used to be the non glowly, which can be bought from the replica npc however, they need the relic grind earlier imo.

Lack of additional dungeons, yes the quality did increase a lot of the dungeons we got and one can argue you run these once and then get bored of them, i feel the problem of expert roulette having only 2 dungeons its likely connected to this.

Nier Raid started out real good and then flatlined on a weekly quest that went nowhere.

Personally i dont understand the hype, or how players on day #1 can give 10/10 to a living system that takes 2 full years to unfold but thats how most of the rating have been polled.
ARR>SB>ShB>HW in terms of story
ARR>HW>SB>ShB in terms of quality, which gives high hopes for quality in EW.