ARR was better

[Galvuu]

the systems i mentioned WERE and ARE objectively better. shb ruined all of the overworld complexity.

I will not deny that ARR was not afraid of fail-states in most combat, segregating responsibilities based on role and had better dungeon design. But you're simplifying (or being nostalgic) about a lot of things.
As another poster commented, the old glamour prism system was incredibly cumbersome (and ate inventory space). Raid design in ARR had moments of unscripted brilliance (T2S, T7S and T8S immediately come to mind as some of the best designs), but it also had awful fights. Even if you were to do the mechanics by going min ilv+no echo, the Crystal Tower raids are not very good. A lot of extreme primals are very simple, and some Coil turns (like T4...) are simply not very good. I actually think that HW and SB raids are much better (HW had as many creative fights, like A3, A5, A6, A8, A10...), especially the 24-man.
Elemental materia was never really a thing (as was the case with most of the cc-reducing ones, beyond some pvp memes)- if you stacked a ton of it, you'd do well in a primal fight, and that was it. It didn't offer much meaningful choice.
The relic was also just busywork. Running the same dungeon a ton of times wasn't very interesting- you can lengthen any content this way. I will concede that ARR had relic-specific trials (the Hydra) and I'd hope this would become a thing again. But HW offered the best relic item (you could fully customize the stats) and, while divisive, I still think Eureka and Bozja offer a better, unique gameplay experience compared to dungeon spam.

I'm not saying ARR was a total wash, but a lot of these things are just grating, artificial lengthening of content. Even if the content is truly superb (it wasn't, most of the time), I'll never think that you can justify running the same 4/5 dungeons 10 times each per relic. I also think Midas, Creator, Aphascape and UCoB, on patch, were much better fights than almost anything else the game has ever offered (notable exception being, as mentioned, T2, T7, T8 and even T9).
If we were to go back in time, I'd much rather have HW or SB than ARR. The game was almost a prototype back then, and the amount of missing QoL or just basic content was staggering.