I was almost in the mood to play FF14 again

[Shurrikhan]

My issue is the extremely selective complaints and hyper focus of complaints of Kaiten when there is more wrong with the melee role in general, Its been over a year, its stale and its played out.

People can make, do make, and have made complaints about the larger state of gameplay and the simplifications of the melee role in general atop complaints about Kaiten. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Why do you see fewer complaints about those things now?

• Because the response to complaints about conal AoEs being turned into circles (starting as far back as Fuga becoming Fuko) was "Here's another conal AoE turned into a radial AoE," followed by "Here, we made the circle bigger."
• Because the response to Senei and Guren costing only as much as Shinten, making our Kenki expenditure feel stale and largely like just spamming Shinten, was to literally make all non-situational Kenki expenditure equal to Shinten.
• Because the response to "True Strike is barely worth having on our hotbars now because it contributes such little damage over Twin Snakes and is a net loss if the latter falls off for even a single GCD" was to buff Blitz.
• Etc., etc.

People get tired of bringing up the same complaints to a wall, especially if those complaints take effort to contextualize. That's why discourse dies out with silent treatment or being repeatedly intentionally misconstrued... while memes alone survive like cockroaches.

Why did "Bring back Kaiten" survive when most other discourse increasingly ebbed per patch cycle? It's short, simple, and synecdochal.

And before you retort with "adding Kaiten back would add complexity and difficulty", is "Press X before Y, every time or you are trolling" really the complexity you absolutely MUST have in the game?

I don't have much have much horse in the race either way. I thought Kaiten should be redesigned from the start, as it was arguably more interesting pre-Kenki Mastery. I simply happened to think your earlier claim that wanting Kaiten back is somehow born of 'Meleewalker entitlement' is absurd.

Potency is not gameplay, and its the melee-range jobs (SAM, WAR, PLD, and [the gameplay consequent to TA on] NIN especially) that have been most hit with the simplification bat. Though individually small, it's literally a complicator. People don't ask for complicators as a buff.

And even that is ignoring, rather foolishly, that complaints about Kaiten's removal aren't just about what Kaiten individually added in that single game-state; it's about removal and having critiques purposely misconstrued.

I get losing skills sucks but a borderline redundant "next skill do big more damage" skill?

Kaiten itself added gauge margining -- which itself includes threat of over-expenditure, especially prior to periods which would also make use of Gyoten and/or wanting to fully spend Kenki under raid-buffs. It wasn't much, but it was something. A something that wasn't replaced. Again, being annoyed by Kaiten's removal does not necessitate that one particularly liked Kaiten, only that they preferred having it to having nothing in its place.

Imo, the Senei/Guren cost reduction and moving their CDs to equal that of their generator (Ikishoten) had a larger impact per potential conflict and, I feel, caused slightly more simplification overall, but Kaiten's was definitely the more frequent.. and there's no prize for being the worse loss.

EDIT: Naturally, Trick Attack's raid buff being moved to Mug also played into this somewhat, especially under higher SkS, since you'd otherwise have a greater portion of unbuffed damage. Note also that the no-Kaiten changes included arbitrary reshuffling our damage away from our core skills and even removed edge case uses like Tenka dealing half as much damage as Midare in just 5-8s the GCDs of prep; it now requires 4 targets to break even, up from formerly being a bonus at 2. Again, Kaiten's loss bundled many a trickle-down effect.