I feel Square should have done an emergency maintenance. The situation has arose due to the taking advantage of the oversight. I personally took the time to learn the normal fight (which is pretty easy, once you understand it) and also participated in the manaburn. The problem I found is that there were people who simply would not try Garuda unless it was a manaburn party.

There seems to be this generalization that Garuda is simply too hard. Well I really hate to burst peoples bubble but she's not. Once you take the time to learn her like any fight she becomes like clockwork and in many ways easier than Ifrit/Moogle. The only difference is that this time the entire party is required and gear needs to not suck. Black Mages in AF i'm looking at you (not hating, I was in AF too when I started :P)

I have quite possibly the worst latency an ISP can provide outside of dial-up. (.110kbps upload as well) to a server that's 75 miles away from my home and I can do that entire fight without getting any sort of server lag.

Grab some friends, learn the fight, and please stop complaining about it. What's done is done, but there's still quite a huge chunk of people on the servers that have yet to clear it.