You're all missing one big important change with monk

[IruruCece]

They don't have to be so useful in combat, if the reason they removed it is because of button bloat, that's a load of bs because i find that these stances hold more meaning than having SSS or Anatman.
Having the different stances made the class fun, plus it made gives the feeling like one is more in control of their character. I mean Stance change to Fist of Earth + Riddle of Earth = got amazing damage mitigation which is SUPER satisfying. i'd honestly take Fist stances back than having bs like Riddle of Wind, Celestial Revolution? Steel Peak(Wtf? that's just Shoulder Tackle)?

I'm not sure what makes anyone think Fist of the Earth provided "amazing" damage mitigation, ever, so I'm assuming it's a 2.0 thing that has been exaggerated in value over the years. It was never the case for me throughout HW, SB, or ShB. If you were ever in a position where a boss looked at you funny, especially in high-end content, you were getting splatted and FoE wasn't going to save you. Maybe it might have help during dungeons, but dungeons are barely more than linear theme parts that get pulled wall to wall, so again if you were the Monk caught in a group of 6-10 mobs (or heck, even just 2-3 really beefy bigbois) and the tank didn't rip aggro off you right away, you were definitely going to end up as crater meat. Even with self-healing in a large group, you weren't living long or at all at the center of attention.

The reality is that AT BEST the scenario described is an extreme edge case. 99.9999999 percent of the time, you'd sit in Fire non-stop in HW, you'd sit in Fire in SB, and for me it was ShB where we had the impetus to switch Fist stances mid-way through the opener (start in fire until GL3, switch to Wind to push to 4, stay in Wind forever/until boss does a cutscene that forces us to reopen because we lost GL rather than SE doing the needful and at least freezing these types of temporary buffs while the artists flexed a game engine at us).

There was nothing dynamic going on with Fist stances, and people had been complaining about that for a long time, even before I started to play. SE consistently failed to provide any real reason to actively switch between them the vast majority of the time. They were kept in because of design inertia, similar to how Tornado Kick used to strip away GL entirely for the longest time: "It's just how it is."