I vastly prefer "real" raids to the glorified trials that FF14 calls raids nowadays.

I get that the mentality over here is that trash is a waste of time and raids are better off just being the boss fights, but there's just something missing when you magically teleport between 4 boss arenas and that's the whole tier. There's no sense of progression. No grandeur. No "holy cow, look at how far we've come" moment when you come out of the hallway and look down from the roof and see your NPC allies occupying the outdoor space that used to contain a boss fight. You just teleport to 4 bosses and kill them and that's it for 6 months.

WoW's method of making trash worth clearing is BoEs ("bind-on-equips"). Random drops that may or may not have good secondary stats or appearances, but they drop at the same item level as the boss loot from the same difficulty and if the secondaries are really just that bad, you can sell the BoE on the Auction House and make some quick gold. No idea if that sort of thing would go over well here with how formulaic and set in stone raid loot is in FF14, though, but I just want SOMETHING other than four generic arena shape bosses per tier. Doesn't even have to be Baldesion Arsenal-level complicated.

Hell, even a Faust-style DPS check prior to the second or third fight in the tier would make me happy at this point. ENOUGH with the glorified trials already.