Difficulty of normal content.

[Linnaete]

1. I'm eventually going to hit a wall in normal content because the hardcore crowd needs *everything* to be a ball-buster even though they already have their own exclusive modes.

Nothing in normal content is a genuine "ball-buster". Of course if you're unfamiliar with a fight then new mechanics will catch you off-guard, but that's remedied with practice (and gear). These are content designed for any randomers in Duty Finder; they're nothing comparable to Extremes and above because players don't need to coordinate strategy just to clear. Some people really need to stop seeing any degree of additional friction intended by game designers as insurmountable content made just to punish casual players.

2. The playerbase is not in fact as "friendly and welcoming" as they claim when a significantly large portion of if it so willfully, and happily even, tells people to "GTFO then" when some players run into difficulty.

Oh, for crying out loud. You're on the FFXIV forums. This place is not representative of the game's wider community and playerbase, much less the minority of posters here hurling the most vitriol.

By and large the wider FFXIV community is accepting of mistakes and/or when a player is new to content. Unless you've done something to actually warrant it (like griefing a party on purpose), other players will generally not kick you from the group or hurl barrages of insults at you simply for making mistakes. Even veterans with more than a decade of FFXIV play will make mistakes here and there. No one is going to have photographic memories of every instanced duty in the game, and some mechanics can be genuinely annoying to handle.

What matters is that you at least make an honest attempt to pick yourself up, learn from mistakes and strive to improve for next time. What people will not have time for are people who are at the lowest possible skill floor because either they're deliberately playing poorly for kicks, or they simply refuse to improve in any way, shape or form. As the majority of this long thread attests, how about the game designers not cater to this latter group?

As someone who only recently touched down in Stormblood, this is the first time I've had to stop and think about how I'm going to do the blue quests because doing so would be adding things to the duty finder where I'll just end up dead weight it seems

How do you know you will? You haven't set foot into any of these later expansion content yet, so how have you already resigned to the belief that you will never be able to contribute? If you do make mistakes, so long as you have the capacity to learn and improve in general, I'm sure you have the capacity to apply this to the game. A solo run with Duty Support can be an excellent way to gain initial familiarity with the mechanics, then once you've accrued enough confidence you can take the next step and try it via Duty Finder.