2 hotbars, including a few defensives, utility and sprint is just right tbh.

There's a bit of artificial difficulty in ff14 rotations, where we get redundant weak off-gcd's, extra dots or debuffs, small 10 sec cd's with 5% impact or extra stages in combos that aren't really necessary just to pad things out. I imagine the idea is to create a situation where maintaining a DoT, 3 buffs/debuffs, watching all your cd's, position and avoiding every mechanic creates a sensory overload that feels like difficulty until you gain enough muscle memory to mitigate that overload. Too much however just takes away from enjoying the fight itself and being able to put full attention into the mechanics.

FF14's not in a bad spot right now tbh. It certainly doesn't need dumbing down and I'd never want them to go the path WoW did which is hilariously over-simplified now, but it could do with some light trimming of the unnecessary stuff.