The duty support is bad for the game's story.

[Jangles]

The duty support function doesn't have to represent the canon events if the group of people we have with us doesn't fit the party of 4 needed for duty support. The story shouldn't bend over backwards and suffer because we just need to have NPCs with fitting roles accompanying us just for duty support.

Most of the time when people wonder "Why is this character even present?" the answer is mostly because they are needed for duty support. Forcing characters to follow us around unnaturaly just for this function has only hurt the game's writing. (Together with many other problems the writing already has.) Going back to the pre-ShB setup of us canonically doing the dungeons/trials with whoever is currently present independent from the gameplay portion would benefit the story.


EDIT:

Also to make it clear I'm not saying duty support should be removed, even though I don't like the feature. It's that it shouldn't be "canonized". We don't need to be doing every story beat with exactly 4/8 people, like for example how we canonically go through a lot of old dungeons either solo or with a group of random amount of people, or how we canonically face Thordan alone, even though the trial is with 7 other players. Gameplay and story don't have to represent eachother 1:1, it's cool if they can but it shouldn't be forced to do so for the detriment of either.

(also do away with the azem crystal already please, it was cool during seat of sacrifice but it's just silly now.)