Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[Driavna]

I don't think you are totally wrong but IMO the main reasons are two:

- The number of slots for normal content is just 4 and for raids are 8. I know we have 24m raids but you can't use most of your spells on people outside your party. That's an incredibly low number to afford extremely specialised classes and also an incredibly low number to support the current number of classes that FFXIV has without overlapping.

- FFXIV heavily revolved around duty finder and in order to be successful at this, all roles are in need to cover the basics, simple at that. This alone prevents the game for design the classes to work around others and "forcing" certain compositions to, for example, have 4 healers: 2 specialised on single target healing (without any AoE healing skill) and two specialised on AoE healing (without any big single target heal).

About the bosses being so heavily scripted has more to do to be viable with almost 0 communication during the fights. Randomize the flares from Eden's Gate: Descent Savage and that fight will become almost impossible to beat for randoms without using voice chats. You could say the same for Titania Extreme Chain of Brambles if that skill was randomized.

In short: current design is the way it is to suits the "I play an MMO game but I don't want to be social" mentality.