Which expansion did they get right, and why?

[Supersnow845]

SB is the most holistically “good” expansion

ShB has a better story and sense of place but is held back by its oversimplification of the jobs and its streamlining of content design

HW “felt” more like an MMO but was held back by esoteric job design and a complete lack of side content

EW was honestly just bad, the story subbed ShB’s epic build or ARR/HW’s political intrigue for glorified hype moments and aura farming and side content reached a critical low

SB balances a good but not perfect story with a well designed set of patch stories that is arguably the only expansion where the patch quests retroactively made the main expansion story better, a wealth of side content that catered to almost every level of play and a good patch cadence with the best balance of HW clunky jobs and ShB “the job plays itself”

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Story wise I'm thinking ShB > HW > StB > ARR/EW >>>> Post-EW >>>> DT. It's the only part where I can rate equally as they do not change, and I was already around before they decided to cull some quests out of ARR (still won't forgive them for culling post ARR Sylphland portion smh).

Job gameplay wise is harder because I'm a ShB baby and thus cannot have any firsthand experience from anything prior to that. Without accounting pre-ShB, I can only say ShB >>>> EW > DT. That being said, we have wayback machine and several sources that I can refer to compare, which I've came to conclude the following: StB >>>> HW > ShB >>>> EW > DT. If only we could have a blend of StB's job complexities and the unclunkiness of ShB gameplay, I'm 99.99% sold.

Content wise is also similar with job gameplay: StB > ShB > ARR/HW >>>> EW/DT. Admittedly this is biased because StB and ShB has both of my favorite contents which are Eureka and Save the Queen. I placed ARR and HW next because those were the times when they still bothered to try new things even though some ended up flopping hard like Diadem, or was poorly balanced like Gordias savage. EW is placed far behind because that's when they IMHO catered too much to single player experience in their goddamned MMO while also not understanding what a 'vacation' (lol Isle lmao) means on top of that. There was also the start of overreliance on body checks in most EX/Savage fights as well which was pretty much the turning point for me to almost never wanting to PF anymore for charities to fill out empty healer slots (it also coincides with peaking healer disappointment in general).

I could go on but that would mean flooding a forum section with my rambling so I'll stop here.