Hissatsu: Kaiten

[Rilifane]

Homogenization of buff windows is, again, not in the service of hardcore raiders. "Hardcore" raiders would easily be able to line up buffs with different cooldowns (IF that's something that would deem to be useful. They would be able to easily go through the math of the buff and see whether holding a 90 cooldown for 30 seconds is worth it to stack the buff with 120 second buffs. That is stuff that "hardcore" raiders LOVE to do. The change to buff windows was squarely done to lower/remove the large DPS difference between midcore/lowcore raiders and hardcore raiders. I'm sure hardcore raiders dislike the change because it removes skill expression and puts them closer in performance to those midcore raiders.

I agree.
Changes that make it easier to calculate something or get the maximum beenfit from something are bringing the skill floor up so the difference between low skill and high skill players becomes smaller. Parsers, high skill players, hardcore raiders etc. don't ask for such things because they don't need them.
They know when to delay buffs to align naturally misaligned raid buffs according to kill times, they know how to play around different burst windows without losing potency during the big 2min windows or even reopener. They largely enjoy it because it gives them more options to squeeze out that last bit of dps by thinking about it instead of just getting it handed. TA is the last remaining buff that isn't on 120s but with the Mug change, it will be.
Now the only thing left to play around with are AST cards and longer raid buffs to snapshot as many buffs as possible with each GCD/ oGCD which isn't much.

Imagine being this wrong. Can't be me. Ignore that samurai has 33 buttons and controllers can only fit 32 and that's not including limit break. Samurai and scholar are over the cap.

And what about all the skill merge proposals made in this thread that would free up to 5 buttons while keeping existing skills?
If it was really about button bloat, they have more than enough to merge without affecting a SAM's rotation or making it job gauge a pointless spam-meter. Merging mutually exclusive skills would be the first priority if button bloat was truly their only concern.