@OP, I am really sorry to hear that. That is one of the main problems with the FFXI niche community that is the main group that stayed with this game for the last year. Unfortunately, the problem only ends with the FFXI niche community. It begins with the dev team. It's the dev team's responsibility to design the game to correct for this flaw in the FFXI community, yet they do nothing. If you had been capped a few months ago, you would be enjoying the endless fruits of Batraal farming as Archer while Lancers were stuck in a glacier.

There may be a lot of downsides to taking an Archer into Ifrit, which is why the dev team needs to create incentives for finishing it with other classes, like a higher drop rate on items the more classes you have in your party. That one simple change would reverse this horrible side of the FFXI community. Who's listening?