Can it still be called a "raid" anymore?

[Penthea]

Why is it still called a "raid" when it drops you straight into a circular/square room with the boss in it? Isn't that a "trial"?

Because it has multiple parts within the same tier. Trials are singular. I get what you're saying but that is the difference.

I think 8 man raids need to take a page out of the 24 man raids' book and make them actual raids again. When you queue in and it just drops you into a fight with the boss, it's boring.

Alexander had trash. The reason why Omega doesn't is because in lore he is literally not very interested in creating trash. He wants to create the ultimate combat monster, so he mostly focuses on making bosses. The Omega trash is fought in the solo duties.

You could structure it to have multiple bosses, each with it's own loot pool. 1-3 mini-bosses that drop minor things like upgrade tokens or rare crafting materials, just to name a couple things off the top of my head. Alternate paths that change the way the raid works, maybe even optional puzzles or battles that reward you with additional cool stuff for clearing them.

Part of what's attractive about raiding in FFXIV is that you don't need to spend a ridiculous amount of time to do it. The lack of trash and mini bosses (that have loot which would inevitably become irrelevant quickly to any decent raiding team) means players get to spend more time on the actual challenging content.

Trash and mini bosses can be fun when they're new but they become dull after a while, no matter how well they're designed. Anything that's not an actual boss has a shorter shelf life when it comes to how interesting they are to fight and how good their loot is. Which means they sooner become a waste of time.

I'm sure some are going to spout something like 'that's too much wasted time, just gimme muh loot', but personally, I find the way raids are currently structured to be extremely shallow & lacking, no matter how colorful the actual fight is. I just wish they'd do something to spice them up a bit, or at least not just give us a trial fight and call it a raid.

A lot of what you're looking for is already in alliance raids.