So, can we just ban damage meters already.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

So this has always bugged me. People make the claim (a lot!) that it's easy to tell if someone's not pulling their weight. But I've never understood this. I know that when I'm playing, I'm not paying careful enough attention to what other people are doing to know if they're doing something fundamentally wrong or not. A healer not healing or a tank not tanking would be about the extent I'm able to monitor other people while still playing my own character. Certainly I could never watch, say, a SMN or something to have any idea if they're doing their rotation properly in savage, ultimate, or extreme trials. There's no possibility of that.

It's not impossible, but I wouldn't call it 'easy' since having a firsthand experience on playing said classes may also play factor in judgment (aka knowing their kits). It's not something all players willing to do: play all/multiple classes.
I.e. 120s is a common next raid burst window in most encounter after starting a fight. If said player have played multiple classes and have some knowledge of their kits, it's quite intuitive to expect seeing the 20s, 30s, 40s, 60s, and 120s big damage button/raid buff icon coming out at this very window because they all line up perfectly at 120s mark. Not seeing one or few of them could indicate some room for more improvement or a mistake made during the heat of encounter. This is just one of the examples of course.

[SaberMaxwell]

In fairness, you don't need a meter to tell when someone is underperforming. If you know how a job functions, just watching a person go about their rotation (or a lack thereof) can be enlightening. How fast or slow an enemy health bar drops can also tell a bit of a story.

You don't need a thermometer to tell when something is hot, but it can quantify things in a way that eyeballing it cannot. What burst windows are being missed, by how much, were deaths involved, were debuffs involved, etc, are all tracked by the same program.

[Vahlnir]

You don't need a thermometer to tell when something is hot, but it can quantify things in a way that eyeballing it cannot. What burst windows are being missed, by how much, were deaths involved, were debuffs involved, etc, are all tracked by the same program.

I realize that. Just pointing out that observation is perfectly valid in the absence of an official dps meter. Maybe not for literally every piece of content, but it's good enough when the other options are zero.