So, I see a lot of interesting points here. There are a few troublesome ones that mostly fall under the purview of the "Git Gud" defense. I don't know how useful that sentiment is; its not like most low DPS are going into their pugs with the "how little can I do" mindset. I wont say that demographic is nonexistent because I know a few people who only play DPS because they can basically get carried so long as they spam Heavy Shot. I feel that this particular thread fails to consider the community support angle. I mentioned earlier that optimization is difficult if you don't have a fleet of testing machines.

Also, I think I sense a certain... misunderstanding; Blizzard does not take responsibility for quality control on their mods. That is entirely the responsibility of the modder. When SE says "we want to include mod support" that only means "You will be able to use 3rd party mods" and not "we will do the legwork to make sure your mods actually work on anything other than your one computer". It also doesn't ensure that SE will strive to maintain compatibility, if a new raid comes out and it causes a fatal exception with your UI mod then fixing it is between you and whoever might be in charge of the mod (if anyone is even paying attention) or whoever is developing a competitive product at the time. All and all, I think this issue is largely soluble once your community hits a critical mass.

Kisai makes an interesting point about mechanically incentivizing skillful play. I'm not sure if the dev team has the firepower to pull off a system that allows better loot drops depending on contribution, plus, I can't help but imagine all of the new players who showed up at the tail end of Heart of Darkness and would, by no fault of their own, be kept away from any of the gear by such a system. I would like to see Kisai elaborate a bit more on her idea, however, sounds interesting.

Risvertashi mentions the unofficial addons. these include parsers but also include the spawn timers for rare mobs. I think these exist in a kind of "sweet spot". They are accessible to people who really need to know how they are doing and are willing to put in some work and ultimately lie just out of reach to players who just want to attack people with bad gear or low skill. I also would like to add onto my point that the ilvl system seems to be doing a decent job of weeding the slackers out of high end content. My wife and I both do high end content regularly (she is disabled and I'm on summer holiday from uni) and while I've never really seen any of these vitriolic players, she has seen one, so, in over 200 combined PUGs, only one jerk is pretty good. Compared to the completely unverified 10%-20% asshole ratio in WoW, I think those stats are damn fine.

Which leads me to a quick aside to Hobostew. The community in XIV is actually very kind compared to other online games, I would, however, urge you to understand that your experience in this game may be an outlying factor and may not be reflective of the general experience.