YoshiP latest internview on the 2 minute meta

[Absurdity]

Consider why a mechanic a mechanic is disliked before removing it?

This is entirely, absolutely the whole problem. They aren't thinking why it is disliked, and their immediate response to people disliking a mechanic or feature is to absolutely remove it rather than trying to find the sweet spot for how many like or dislike a system. Whilst they maintain a stance that removing a system is the solution to the problem of it being disliked then they are never going to amount to having that balance.

Edit: I'm not even talking about combat at this point, but they are just shafting themselves for having an actual intricate system. Whistle While You Work and Concealed nodes had the absolute perfect depth to them... They weren't without problems, but man were they intricate.

Whistle While You Work was the sole reason I managed to complete recipes I absolutely wasn't geared enough for. I regularly complain about the combat and battle job changes since Shadowbringers, because that's my main focus, but the loss of the old crafter skills was just as tragic.

And to this day I have no idea who these changes were for...actually I do know, it was for the people who didn't actually want to play a crafter.
So now you're basically using the same 5 buttons for 95% of all crafts.

[Kaurhz]

Whistle While You Work was the sole reason I managed to complete recipes I absolutely wasn't geared enough for. I regularly complain about the combat and battle job changes since Shadowbringers, because that's my main focus, but the loss of the old crafter skills was just as tragic.

And to this day I have no idea who these changes were for...actually I do know, it was for the people who didn't actually want to play a crafter.
So now you're basically using the same 5 buttons for 95% of all crafts.

It was broken but it absolutely rewarded players for investing in -- and interacting with it. They absolutely could have made a balance to it, and the ironic thing with it, is that with a capped variant it would have been the perfect solution to modern expert recipes, versus having them consistently fall under RNG checks, rather than legitimate player skill... There's only so much you can do when you fail all your Rapid Synths under Veneration and Muscle Memory.

Their whole sales pitch for utterly gutting crafting was "We didn't want people that would just look up macros and wanted people to try it on their own" - When the ironic thing here is that people didn't search up macros because it was too difficult, they did it because it was convenient - Just like they still do anyway. So we essentially got 80% of a crafting system literally butchered for nothing. Changed nothing, improved nothing.