Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
Note that I do fully agree with your statement, but I do believe in the devs' minds it makes perfect sense because what they want their game to be is guitar hero where you don't play RPG combat but a musical instrument. The more buttons you have, the more you have to play it like an instrument. The unreliability or rng often gets in the way. The real goal is to execute your long string of button presses successfully like you'd play a set piano piece.
While I do not disagree with your main point, I do find the comparison to "play[ing] a set piano piece" problematic.

The only reason why we have 10s or 100s of recordings of any given "set piano piece" is because each musician -- each artist, each performer -- brings their own understanding and interpretation to it. At one extreme of this reality, Beethoven Blues comes to mind.

By contrast, a simple minded robot -- or 8 of them working in concert -- can get you through modern FFXIV encounters, and it's not at all clear to me whether "skill expression" means, or can mean, anything more than "am better able to impersonate said collection of robots."