Why do Raid Buffs even exist?

[Mithron]

I started when late/post ShB was current. I figure that as long as even one party member has a raid buff, then the question inevitably becomes, "How does everyone dump as much potency as they can under the buff?" Which, if the raid buff is on a 2min cooldown, is the 2min meta.

Are you saying that somehow wasn't the case back in HW and SB? Or something else?

Trick Attack was on a 60 second cooldown, but every job was more uniquely designed with some buttons being 90s or even other weird timers like 80s so things didn't always line up perfectly and if you tried to force it, it ended up being a DPS loss. A lot of people still wanted NIN for Trick, but they only exasperated the problem by redesigning every job to play exactly the same under the 120s window. Now everyone lines up every 120s, whereas before only a handful of jobs did.