I completely agree.

Tldr: It's just not fun yet, please keep trying.

I came to realize how far the game is from enjoyable when I recently started playing Xenoblade Chronicles.

To some it might sound like an unfair comparison but actually the controls and the execution of combat is very close to that of XIV. The only thing is that Xenoblade manages to involve strategy to even the short fights whereas in XIV you're mostly just watching the stats of the encountering 3d models do battle and your order of skills/spells doesn't have that big of an impact on the combat flow.

Strategy should start at level 2 not at endgame.