There has not been a single major patch without a critical issue since Endwalker.

[Arzalis]

I'd say it's little things like the lack of Miqo'te ears in headgear that happened at the very start of ShB. They used to do that. There are some pretty good examples of similar headgear in ARR that have them to ShB and EW sets that don't. Now they just sell cash shop gear that cuts them off too.

Stuff like that by itself isn't a huge deal, but it adds up along with other things that you handily listed to show a trend downward. They're removing or reducing things we've typically gotten left and right. Even the things we do get have been pretty messed up lately, which would understandable for a studio who wasn't used to MMOs, but this game has been going on for a while. If they don't have systems to reliably test for failures under stress now, then they never will.

ShB is generally praised for it's MSQ (which I think it deserves) but with their clearly dwindling available resources, it's obvious that's where most of the focus on the game goes. The main issue with EW is the MSQ had the same level of attention at the expense of everything else, but the MSQ just didn't land for a lot of people. So I think that's why you're seeing an uptick in complaints.

Also, yeah. I wasn't sure if the one above post is sarcasm either. It pretty clearly lists objective quality issues (along with some subjective ones.)