SWTOR Refugee here....

[Kolsykol]

Honestly I'm amazed you stuck around as long as you did. My first MMO was SWTOR, back in the golden age of 2.x, and it has fallen FAR. I was really put off by how the story became clearable with just your autoattack in 4.0. Completely took away all sense of engagement from leveling - the game's strongest point. Left in 5.0 when it was clear the devs had lost all sense of how to manage an MMO. Not surprising to hear that it has somehow gotten worse.

Regarding the suggestion of shared storage, I would be okay with that, but it would need to stop there. I think one of the game's strongest points is the fact that alts are not required. This allows the developers to not have to worry much about account wide progress, so you can actually start fresh with a new character instead of having to create a whole new account to have the true "fresh start" experience like most other MMOs.

I realize I am probably in the minority on this, but I like to occasionally create alts to re-experience everything the game has to offer. I do this with single player games too. The difference is, with an offline game you have direct control over your save data. Delete your save data, clear your cloud saves, and you're good to go. With MMOs it is usually not so simple, if it is even possible. I have been really annoyed at other MMOs to find that there isn't much you can do to have a true fresh start aside from creating a brand new account. It's refreshing to actually genuinely start from square one with a new character in FF14.

I tried going back because I wanted to play some of the stories I hadn't played yet ( mainly Consular and Smuggler ).
But the combat felt so clunky to me it just wasn't enjoyable.

And this is me using Mudfish with fastconnect too ( tried without too ), the connection was really unstable without even with Mudfish and no packet loss showing I still had some spikes...
The connection definitely wasn't the issue tho but that's also kinda the point.
There's so much animation and gcd clipping, it's hard to tell whether the gcd actually clips or not but damn it felt so clunky and unresponsive.
I tried Madness too on Sorcerer and it felt horrible to play.

It just didn't feel like when I pressed the button that the attack actually happened when it should I dunno how else to explain it really but I think with how smooth FFXIV feels it kinda made it more apparent than it used to be.
It felt sometimes like the game couldn't decide if it wanted to use the skill or not and like it undid and then redid the cast or something it was just weird.

I tried doing some flashpoints too and either people were rude or they just ignored that I was a returning/ new player and just mounted through everything and the dialogue skipping was quite painful too.
I was just constantly being left behind because they mounted past mobs before they spawned or stealthed past them and just left me o_o...
It was a pretty negative experience overall tbh.

Which is sad because I have very fond memories of it, I pre-ordered it and played the Beta I loved it for the years I played.