I'm not sure if people are just having knee jerk reactions to it and not thinking about what they're typing, or they just were yelled at by someone in XI once for not gear swapping and were so thin-skinned about it that it's the worst thing in the world.

Removing gear swapping doesn't remove elitism. There are still best in slot items, and those BiS items are still going to make a difference between use them and using second, third, fourth best. Most gear swapping in XI between the best and second best came down to single point differences, and for the 6 years I played, 99% of the time as long as people saw you make an effort, that is what counted. It's when you refused to make an effort that people made it an issue, and it will be the exact same here. If you don't make an effort to make it appear as if you care about gearing your character appropriately, you'll be called out on whether the gear swapping system is in place or it isn't.

Changing gear prior to the fight or macro swapping during the fight is a silly argument when used in conjunction with "I never had inventory room". If you're actually a person who makes those decisions, then your inventory is going to suffer regardless whether you can gear change or not; you have to store those pieces somewhere. Regardless, the team could directly address the amount of gear swapping and the macro space required for it as I said on page 2:
Quote Originally Posted by Tacotaru View Post
It would be nice to see it come back once server latency is fixed and they corrected the problems third party tools had to fix in XI.

-Give each job a set number of mannequins designed for the player to set up for gear swaps.
-Let macros be able to execute gear swapping from the mannequin so macro line increases aren't necessary. This allows SE to not have to worry about botting by someone making an infinitely looping macro.

Until macro latency is fixed it's a worthless endeavor to pursue, but once it is it wouldn't be bad.
They've already said equipment on mannequins won't count against your inventory so that removes that problem and actually frees up space. Unless of course people will say it's easy mode and they want less inventory.