Legitimate reasons why many of you do NOT like Gear Swapping

[Rogue]

I think this is exactly where I disagree with you. Take the encounter with a lot of fire damage example I used earlier for instance, during progression I may want to stack up on fire resist so that I increase my likelihood to survive longer. This way I get to see more of the encounter and build my experience on it, whether it's learn to dodge the fire damages, or learn to damage the boss more efficiently. However, once I familiarize myself with how the fight works, I can start taking off fire resist gear and start swapping in my dps set, this way I can squeeze the time of encounter, less time spent in the encounter means less chance of making a mistake, thus downing the boss eventually. Sure, you can argue and say there's always the "best" dps set, but that set is always evolving unless the devs decide to not put in anymore dps gear. As a tank, once you learn how to dodge/mitigate some or most of the big damage moves, you can also start wearing some dps/threat focused gear to allow the dps to push harder as well.

sorry it was a long post so ill focus on the bold part to make my over arching point.

by equiping fire damage gear you will allmost certainly be giving up some other attribute, so heres where my point kicks in, there wasnt any real benefit to changing gear in the first place.

and there is a scenario where -fire damage gear might be viable.. its called ifrit and in fact i used said gear the first couple of times and guess what... i found out that over all it made close to no difference to if i had used my "normal" gear setup. it may have even hindered me.

with gear swapping the effect of different gear is compounded by the fact you dont have to give up a stat you would normally use.