The new player experience and how FFXIV fails as an MMO.

[Shurrikhan]

Which two? I'm not sure to see what parameters you're referring to?

Job kit depth and combat content design.

Difficulty is subjective. I find DT dungeons a lot more difficult than they've been in any expansion. The "be here by X time" mechanics are tenfold in comparison to what they used to be, and their pace has been cranked up significantly so that the bosses shotgun them at you without any respite, which is the most notable in luigi's mansion and tender valley, but they're merely the extreme end of the spectrum.

It is subjective, yes, but for the life of me, I can't think of a boss with above-average difficult outside of the first boss of "Luigi's Mansion", and even that can be easily cheesed.

There has never been any DPS checks in dungeons, let's be real for a minute.

• Reduce boss health by x% from start of mechanic, or mechanic continues applying another vuln stack every few seconds, eventually one-shotting, or to end pursuit phase which would otherwise kill someone.
• Kill adds or they explode, wiping the party.
• Kill add in time to create safety zone/launch pad, or wipe.
• Break barrier in time to stun mob and thereby survive heavy damage.
• Kill thing before it seeks down and kills a random target.
• Kill thing before it apply enough stacks, which explode upon reaching 3 for half your life's worth of damage... as an AoE.
• Can stunlock thing and burst it down to prevent tank receiving 40% more damage taken.
• Mob triples its damage after a cast X seconds into the fight and has untelegraphed cleaves that hit tanks for about 30% of their HP before said buff.
• Or, hell, even just actually threatening full pulls +/- environmental mechanics.

...Have these been purged from memory as well as implementation?

Coordination? What coordination? What was there to coordinate?

Cumulatively, from original, pre-power-creep XIV across to Shadowbringers? CC. Add gathers. Triggering ICDed environmentals. TTK management around DoTs and TP. Baiting out AoEs and other specials to reduce tank damage intake.

I do agree that job kits have made way to encounters

I said the opposite. I don't think job kits were unique in being simplified, I don't think encounters now are more complex than seen earlier, and I certainly don't think the simplifications were done just to support the shifts (simplifications towards DDR alone) in general combat design.

The simplifications to job design and content design are simply iterations of the same desire to smooth things down, not end and means to one another. DDR-fixation didn't cost us job kits. DDR-fixation cost us the bulk of what all we used to have in content design beyond DDR, while present smoothed-down job kits cost us what idiosyncrasies --the fun, the meh, and the fugly-- we had available in prior kit iterations. They didn't need each other to have narrowed down as they did. Interdependence between them only so far as caster mobility and the frequency & duration of discrete 'Move!' mechanics, which have been used as much as they have only because... we've apparently forgot how to design in anything else that could be of interest.