What does FFXIV lack?

[Valence]

I can't get into an ever expanding quote spree

I'm frankly too lazy to write an essay about this, but what you're completely missing is the MP changes literally mean that currently MP song is baked into base MP regen (much like Tank stances are now baked into Tank Mastery). MP used to regen incredibly more slowly. This is also when I say this made resource scarcity actually meaningful back then because raising was not only punished with hefty MP costs like today, but it wasn't magically fixed after a couple of GCD once your MP restabilizes by itself. Today it's just a raise amount cap to prevent people to keep raising forever. Back then, it literally played into MP management, and running low could be ugly because the resource was a lot more valuable. But what you said about GCD heals being used a lot more (less and less as we got new expansions with new free OGCD heals sadly), also played directly into that MP management gameplay.

Also perhaps I should have been more precise on what situation was being talked about: single target boss gameplay was dramatically different from AoE trash gameplay. I do believe the discussion arose from trash that used to be more interesting though, so my argument was fully centered around this. Every AoE move was extremely expensive to use — Holy costed 1600 MP for instance, on a total pool lof 15-16k MP with almost zero regen outside of Shroud of Saints (Lucid) and of course, out of combat, which was still slow. This by definition introduced a lot of considerations and management depending on the team, the skill of every player (tanks tanking well or not, and dps doing good damage or not), their gear, etc. No run was identical to another, especially on healers, because of this very reason. This is why the removal of all of this turned me off healing completely (at least from healing past the levels where healers get their main MP draining AoE damage tools).

Every single job had to deal with this to some extent. Some with more control over it than others, granted. BLM excepted I guess. Back in HW where AoE dungeon balance was completely out of whack (because the devs didn't care at all), you had jobs like DRG that could dish out an incredible burst of AoE damage but completely peter out after 20s. Some others like MCH notably in SB had an incredibly strong sustain in the form of Tactician and Flamethrower (11s of free resource damage). A lot of different profiles in fact.

The only thing I didn't like was how running out of TP or MP was extremely frustrating to play with especially on non healer jobs, and I wish the devs back then had thought a little more about how to address this state of demi failure on the party's behalf.