The direction of this game has been going in the wrong direction ever since SB, ever since they began removing job interaction and complexity and identity. The MSQ has shifted quite heavily away from it's roots of political maneuvering and some actual nuance in favour of... what? Friendship is magic and fist clenches? Hamfisted attempts and philosophy that require at least a whole expansion + post patches to properly explore but are never given time and room to germinate. It's not all bad but most of it is. What gets me the most is that these changes were spurred on by making the game more accessible and less intricate for a majority who would never have an interest in getting better at playing it no matter how easy you made it for them. Take ARR, people complained first coil was too easy, so second coil was very challengeing and people complained about not only that but the fact that it didn't have a story mode. Third coil was laughable by comparison and people complained AGAIN demanding harder content. Well, they got it with HW, the gordias savage was so hard it all but killed the raiding scene but there was a story mode now, right? Soooo... next came the knee-jerk overcorrection moving into SB - that said, i think SB was probably the best content the game ever had to offer even if i didn't like the shift the game took going into that expansion.

Unfortunately its been downhill from there ever since and over the years i've been accused of all sorts of things from it "not being my game" to "do you hate fun or something?" and I'll say this as my parting comment; A game--especially an MMO--lives and dies on it's integrity and i'm sorry to say that FF14 has been lacking integrity for a very long time. I don't expect it to return and especially not if Yoshi-P isn't hands on with the steering. He's clearly working on other projects and delegating to untested devs. But what can you?