Well you've been hanging around here lately so may have caught some arguments on this, but for the duration I've been here, the general opinion is that high-potency attacks are bad because of how these attacks critting or not critting can make such a massive difference. However, I only see it brought up occasionally, so it's the sort of issue that not everyone brings up over more simpler buzzwords like "2 minute meta". It tends to get brought up when someone makes a more detailed post about the subject, which is rare, compared to just saying "2 minute meta = bad".

I remember that before this was such a big issue, WoW had a similar problem that everyone brought up as a way of saying this game was better. They would say that WoW's crit variance was so massive that it completely imbalanced the classes on a massive scale and that SE was better with balance, leaving only minimal differences. But now in this expansion, we have reached a point where burst windows caused a significant imbalance that made GNB practical to clear P8S over a PLD due to things like Double Down in a burst window.

As for auto-crits and auto-dh, these were complained about a lot until SE addressed it by making crit chance and DH chance still contribute extra damage to the attacks, but this effectively makes them high potency attacks as well.

It might just be better if we flat out didn't have buff windows and just have our job rotations, or if party damage buffs couldn't stack so that people just spread them out and don't feel the pressure to get all attacks into a narrow window.

I do like high-potency attacks. They feel good. But they don't need to be that high. I remember a "high potency attack" used to be something like 400, 500 or 600 potency, not 1200. But maybe it's the stat squish and how high level we are now. Maybe we just need to condense levels so ARR goes up to 30 instead.