Exactly. All I'm asking for is a few answers and yet people seem fit to think "oh well you just suck because you can't play outside of animation lock." Not that I need to defend it, but I've won Ifrit plenty of times and don't need any more skill. I say to those negative people: Thanks for the suggestion, but you really have no idea what you are talking about.
It seems like the player fan base of SE/FFXIV are totally brain washed from being jerked around for years in XI. I'm actually laughing out loud every time I open this thread now and see all these posts about animation lock being a positive thing. Doesn't seem like many of the people supporting this have any experience with MMOs outside of FF.
As it stands right now, heavy armor = tanks in EXP PT. It's already "Kill as fast as possible to increase EXP." This is pretty common in most MMOs with the same pacing as FFXIV and not a new concept. The tanking concept only becomes important later when you deal with raiding. However, all characters participating in a raid should be able to perform their roles without standing apart so greatly from one another that they are marked useless and never invited to that raid. Ifrit is a perfect example of this. Archer gets animation lock from regular attacks? Bam. Instant useless class. You levelled Archer to 50 for absolutely no reason and SE spits on you in response. Time to play LNC, MRD or CNJ I guess. Or quit.
It's no wonder why this concept you're defending is unpopular and considered a design flaw.
Real life & Movies != Video games. Just because something is hyper realistic does not mean it will be a good idea when you create an artificial world with artificial systems that only work by mimicking real life and then skewing reality to be entertaining. In real life you wouldn't be casting magical purple light that suddenly is supposed to heal another characters wounds, even when those wounds keep coming. In real life you wouldn't be taking repeated hits from a giant creature considered a primal god and live to tell about it. Saying "it's realistic and that's why I think it should stay this way because I can just play another class" is being highly counter-productive and very besides the point.
The problem here is not that a player couldn't figure out a way to adapt like everyone else who actually gets to go as one of the "required classes". The problem is because everyone knows that they are "gimped" from a broken mechanic, they do not get invites. They don't even get a chance to defend why their class should go if it's really in the hands of a more-capable player. This is a direct result of a design flaw. You can't really blame the majority of the player base from shying away from ARC when you are trying to set up a group and have your heart set on winning.