Thanks for the response guys. I'm appreciative of those who are trying to help elaborate and further clarify my original post (thanks Litre lol). And while I see many other critical posts, I feel the great majority of those are borne out of misunderstanding and fear that shifting the fight away from gimmicks/mechanics would make things too easy or "tank-and-spank-y", which is obviously not the OP's intention.

It's hard to imagine how you can manage such a shift away from mechanics-driven fights while maintaining the same level of challenge (the OP certainly took his/her best stab at it), because non-mechanics-driven fights are incredibly hard to balance and have much shorter shelf-life (see T4). Nevertheless, I think we've simply reached a point where enough people are frustrated (if this thread is any indication) that Yoshida (and the rest of us) should stop and think whether we really want to keep going in this direction.

A couple of my FC mates needed to run Gilgamesh yesterday for the story. Absolutely no one was doing it in DF, so we ran it as a FC. The fight was super easy, nobody got any rewards.

Yet it was more fun than any other fight I've done in recent memory. Certainly more fun than your daily roulette chores and coil runs that are either filled with annoying fails or a few clears where the overwhelming sentiment was usually relief (that it's finally done with) rather than joy.

And as you walk about in your hard-earned shiny new high allagan gear and realize that - outside of the select few people who knows about the grueling rope jumping you needed to do for it - nobody else in the game around you actually cares and you'll still wipe the floor with it next week if even one person in your static is missing, you do really need to start to think whether it's all worth it.