What do you like and dislike most in FFXIV?

[RiceisNice]

Like:

-The overall presentation of fights, equipment and aesthetic appeal (to an extent).
-The Story and supplemental lore through side quests and dialogue.


Dislike:
-The design of throw-away content, and by extension, lack of focus in content direction
-Overselling and under-presenting of content (MCH, and other expansion features such as FC crafting),
-Direction of the aforementioned aesthetics in general. This would mean things like making every mount flying in some manner, the design of equipment like the PotD being glowsticks and the yokai glamour.
-The recycled battle system; whether it be FATEs, dungeons, PotD, Aquapolis or open world fights, all non-boss mobs can be defined as something that either does a weaponskill/.5 second spell for slight damage, or telegraphed AoE. It starts to get tiring when you run into this for 2 years, which then goes into...
-Lack of middle difficulty. You either have bosses that become overgeared on release (EX dungeons) or soul-busting savage that requires a static commitment. Though this is mostly a problem for long-standing players. The very scarce content I ever find to be enjoyable anymore are the EX trials since they don't boil down to 10-15 minutes of generic trash mobs but don't require me to find a solid group and put off time to commit.

And I'm sorry I have to say this despite OP's disclaimer, but mostly because my forum account is going to go on lock soon due to ingame inactivity.

-The community. I've been mostly reading threads about how people dislike the content, people who like the content, and this is my take away. The former gets a lot more posts, but more than half the posts typically degrade into disagreements about how OP is wrong, telling them not to do the content. Compare it to the latter, it typically drops off the radar really fast and has much, much less posts in comparison, and they're generally all in agreement. Honestly it feels like a witch hunt the moment someone voices their opinion about how they dislike the content (within reason, but that's honestly the case for most of them), and they typically don't go out of their way to chastise someone for liking the content (again, within reason). Likewise with topics who have people voicing their dissatisfaction with the direction of the game and unsubbing; it's gotten bad to the point that someone felt the need to (inaccurately) point out that the OP was still playing the game, despite having an inactive account after that topic.

Honestly if mobs that weren't bosses were a bit more involved in every area, it'd address alot of my issues in regards to content like PotD, Aquapolis, and even Diadem. Likewise with expanding the horizon a bit when it comes to gameplay design (jobs and combat mechanic), not just design that utilizes the same gameplay (instanced zones and drops). A release of an expansion is the perfect time to do that, but areas like MCH, FC crafting, airships and red scrips feel very, very underutilized in making them truly standout and become something that remains a variable in each major patch.