Why refusing customization is a fallacy

[Reynhart]

Being sub-optimal means you get odd looks from others

What others ?

The people in Duty finder who won't care as long as everything go smootlhy even if you're not the ultra top DPS they'd like you to be ?
Or the friends who play with you, who know perfectly how you want to play for fun and that it's enough to clear 90% of the content, even at launch ?
Or the people in Party Finder, that you will probably avoid simply because they'll refuse 1st timers on day one and kick you at the 1st mistake ?

And again, apart from Alex Savage, we'll overgear every content pretty soon. Look at ARR. At launch, the best gear was ilvl90.
It allowed you to enter every instance up to Turn 6, released 6 months later.

By the time "casual" content required such a high item level, everybody was around ilvl 120 or higher. Who cares if your BLM isn't perfectly speced if you can roll on content by gear only ?

The real fallacy is pretending that game balance is only important for hardcore raiders. As I've said elsewhere:

If you're not a raider, chances are you'll do most of your content either on Duty Finder or with people you know. That is to say, instances where people don't care what job you are as long as you know how to play it.

FFXI is a terrible comparison since party leaders could always picked exactly who and what they want.

As I said, "Best In Slot" is a real thing in FFXIV, yet it could be the first form of discrimination.