Combat system is beyond saving.

[Jeeqbit]

Filling that knowledge gap (for me and many other players) was the most fun part of the experience back then. Becoming aware of how little I knew and how much room for improvement there was was very motivating and ultimately very satisfying when I felt I had reached mastery of a given job.

I agree, to a degree, I just think the gap was too big then. That said, perhaps it is too small now. Everything needs to be in balance.

I think a big part of why there was such a gap was just janky, shot-in-the-dark design, but with how smooth everything is now they could add a knowledge gap that is smoother and not like "well you didn't know that elemental materia is useless?", and more like "oh, I didn't know that, but now that I do, it's very logical and makes complete sense and I should have guessed it"

Also each job was so different that it was always exciting to pick up a new one and go on the same journey again.

I agree that jobs have become too much the same. I like to see at least a bit of uniqueness, such as the idea of WAR taking damage but healing it back up, DRK absorbing damage into a sheild, PLD being raw % mitigation and GNB being an all-rounder and regen tank. But EW just destroyed even that little bit of nuance. If they are really planning to make jobs unique in 8.0, then it baffles me why this isn't the case for 7.0 when that is what is upcoming.

This was almost true for standard raids/trails but aggro management was a big deal in dungeons or any content that needed AoE damage.

I disagree. Maybe for packs of enemies because our AoE was only like 100 potency, but for bosses it was still just do enmity combo 1 time (in HW) or 3 times (in SB) in stance then you could permanently DPS without worry. The fact I could drop out of stance permanently on a boss after just that virtually destroyed the concept of aggro management for it and made it a joke.

Again, perhaps true for raids but in dungeons managing it was important.

Managing TP in dungeons was, again, in my experience only something that seemed to come up when DPS did poor AoE damage. If I went into the same dungeon on a DPS, I destroyed all the enemy packs so fast compared to when I was tanking and watching DPS struggle with this, so TP issues didn't seem to come up and if they did there was a simple TP restore action. To me personally, TP felt mostly irrelevant and most likely the developers saw it this way too.

When everyone was struggling to DPS a pack down and reached TP issues, it was nice and all seeing people use their TP buff actions but it felt like... if we all just had better gear and did more damage it wouldn't have come to this. It was especially noticeable as a PLD, because nobody was gonna buff my TP, so if I ran out it was annoying and I couldn't do anything due to the low DPS.

When was it that Tanks had to make macros to mark the kill order of dungeon trash so the DPS wouldn't attack an enemy the Tank wasn't attacking and pull aggro from them?

This was in ARR. I played in ARR, but it seems this was even before my time.

When I started playing, I read guides made by journalists that said "target each enemy 1, 2, 3" so they can single target them. I did that in ARR leveling dungeons, especially since PLD had no AoE unless they spammed Flash and did no damage.

But I quickly discovered that if you had a BLM in the party, they just ripped aggro from you with their AoE. So I abandoned the journalist advice and rotated the targets I was hitting with PLD's single target combo, with my heaviest attacks going on the enemy with the lowest HP which meant I was more likely to lose aggro from it. This was a success, and I stopped caring if my party did AoE. Not listening to the advice on the internet and learning for myself made me a better tank tbh.