One more post in case Arthars decides to brigade the thread again:
If Pong had FFXIV-style "snapshotting" and lag, do you think video games would've taken off when they did? Or would people have simply shrugged them off as a janky gimmick? Because, as far as I know, gaming has always been about matching your controls with the video output.
Imagine hitting your pixel ball by the bottom half of your stick and it still misses. Do you think people would have enjoyed playing video games like that?
The Final Fantasy XIV community has this "snowflake" attitude whereby they pretend like their game is uniquely gifted. It has the best story with the best gameplay. They don't play anything else. I play very old games, including online games, and none of them have this issue that you all are fawning over. It's 2024, we should be more advanced, not less. This is a very easy thing to get behind.
This is a losing argument. You should've argued that these raids don't have lag, rather than trying to defend the lag. No other AAA game has this issue to the extent that FFXIV has.
If the engine is bad, then the content is bad. Pre-Dawntrail content was slower to accommodate the slower engine. Now they have sped up mechanics without fixing the underlying engine. There have been numerous issues outlined by OP and others, including the first boss of Strayborough and a few of the other mechanics in the raid series, where mechanics move faster than the snapshot period and have unclear cast zones. We will see what happens when Savage comes out, but my prediction is that it will get even faster to the point where people will complain. And the same acolytes will come out saying that Savage is "supposed to be hard".
I am only outlining an obvious problem. There are two solutions, slow down the mechanics or fix the engine. The community doesn't like the former, so the second is the obvious choice. But it seems more likely that none will be chosen and instead this will persist because people deny that the problem exists.