Quote Originally Posted by MomomiMomi View Post
It's been like this since FFXI. That's about 17 years. Don't expect any change.

The reasoning they gave back then was that they wanted the players to figure it out as a community. They still do that with a lot of things in the game today ("communicate with your fellow players to learn how to progress"), so it's likely still the same reasoning.
This is also what I remember. Also it's not like you have plenty of gear options. You're mostly picking between two sets at cap level, while leveling higher ilvl is pretty much the way to go, always, since stat impacts aren't meaningful in rainbow gear.

Min/maxing is also something that should take a bit of effort and distribute players across skill tiers. Obfuscating stat weights in a really simple gearing environment (2 to 4 sets at most, often times only one viable build, on rare occasion two viable builds) is a way of creating this distribution.
I really don't mind. It just means you have an opportunity to create a bit of a gap in optimizing between you and others by taking 30mn to read up on third party theorycrafting.