Content should be challenging to execute... Not challenging to learn

[Eisenhower]

I'd be fine with going in blind in learning mechanics if they gave you some idea of what to do. For instance in A1, one of my party members ran through the add debuff and got shrunk, that's when we came up with the idea of putting it under the missiles, none of us had done the fight before.

While in A4 with the judgment debuff, it doesn't accurately explain what to do with it or what it does. That is what I'd call a bad way to do things, they shouldn't be stingy with information.

If you're referring to the Judgement Nisi A/B ability, it is clear from the tooltip of the debuff. It says "You have Judgment A or B and that receiving the other judgement will result in a death sentence". It is not a stretch of the imagination to infer from this that you do not want the other debuff. Considering the fact that the Judgement Nisi only applies to healers (unless you're busy wiping) that spend their time watching the party list anyway, it is also not a challenging task to see that another debuff has been placed among the party members. I argue that there's no lack or obfuscation of information happening.

I really think this game needs a dungeon journal like WoW where it tells you what the boss mechanics are and what they do so you have some idea of what will happen when you go in. But just because you have an idea of what the mechanics are, you still need to figure out the specific strategy around the mechanics and practice until you know what they look like and what to watch out for.

Let me apologize in advance for my french, so to speak. But the dungeon journal in WoW is a piece of shit that should never exist in the form it does now. The level of information it provides and the time at which it provides that information makes it a guide to solve an encounter from the very developers themselves.

If the journal provided this information some time after the release of content, then sure. It helps those people that have fallen behind. If the journal provided information that was diffuse but acted as hints to figure out a strange mechanic, then sure, it helps players overcome a hurdle. Unless I'm mistaken the journal provides detailed information (e.g. At 10% the boss will do <thing>, this is how you conteract it.) the moment the patch hits, or even before that if PTRs are involved.

Endgame encounters are in essence puzzles that are solved with coordination and violence. Half the challenge is figuring out what the pieces of the puzzle is. With the dungeon journal, that half of the challenge is removed and just placed in front of the user.

The journal coddles the player. It removes incentive for players to be attentive and catch audiovisual cues from the game environment as well as for players to read tooltips and piece the fragments of information together to form a solution to the problem set before them.

You said yourself that players shared information. That is exactly the same as watching a video or reading a strategy.

Are you telling me that going in blind, wiping, observing and then chatting with your party members in order to devise a strategy against the boss is the same as watching a video or reading a guide text online? Gods forfend.