Is the new Ultimate too hard?

[ArcaviusGreyashe]

If you're not going for World First, no fight in the game requires you 16 hours a day. There's nothing preventing you from clearing any Ultimate with casual hours.

Yes, eventually, even TOP will be clearable with 4-6 hours a week, once guides are published... What's the hardest about WF is not executing the mechanics, but analyzing the 10 new seconds of fight you just discovered after 2 hours to get back to this point, since you don't know how to perfectly do mechs yet.

[Amarande]

Nearly every raid team in the game is "cheating." Third-party tool usage has increased exponentially since ARR, although it wasn't unheard of back then. The majority of players do not raid for the challenge - it's for the clout. This rings true from EX, to savage, and all the way up to Ultimate.

This is a definite feeling, and I'm not sure what happened to "for fun and challenge" either, it seems like it's been degenerating more in the last few years too, because I remember this "clout" mentality being far less pervasive in the olden days (especially in Diablo 2, Guild Wars 1, and Wrath of the Lich King where I played most in my formative online RPG years). Now it hangs over everything like the proverbial wormwood, and it hardly even matters what game you play anymore unless you find something extremely niche (or, perhaps, RNG-driven enough that even the best player can't prevail on a bad enough luck day, like card and dice based games).

Is it something within the game (like later in this post)?

Is it mainly a culture shift in the real world (which would explain why the community conflict is so persistent, as we've gone from the olden days of gaming which was almost completely dominated by Gen X and Xennials to a multi-generational era and frankly, speaking as a late 70s baby, Gen Z and us seem to routinely be practically polar opposites especially when it comes to hobby culture)?

Something else altogether?

Yes, eventually, even TOP will be clearable with 4-6 hours a week, once guides are published... What's the hardest about WF is not executing the mechanics, but analyzing the 10 new seconds of fight you just discovered after 2 hours to get back to this point, since you don't know how to perfectly do mechs yet.

... unless it's this part alone perhaps that is sufficient to set the culture, i.e., it really is SE like the raider Discords always insisted to me when I would verbally fence with them about it in the past. IOW, that XIV's mechanical design makes blind progging harder fights entirely too stressful and time consuming unless you actually are an e-sports level group (when you probably have the competitive clout mindset naturally), due to the obstacle course time trial paradigm of itself (which in turn trickles into PF culture and EX simply because it thus does not take a lot of imperfection here and there across a group to make runs miserable, especially if you practically speaking need to bam out a large number of clears to meet your goals)?