Just to quote the OP, I did read the entire thread but I don't want to go through quoting everyone XD.
Incoming wall of text, brace yerselvz D:
I am in favor of soulbinding. I've played other games where they bound stuff and to start with I was like "What is this, I don't even..." but then after getting used to it, I thought that it wasn't so bad after all.
There's a couple of things that come into play when trying to make soulbinding work;
!) Availability of materials - If materials for crafted items are easy to gather, then this makes soulbinding less of a pain in the arse. There's always going to be a few bits that may suck, such as dodore leather for instance, but these are for high-end-omg-not-giving-you-this-if-my-life-depended-on-it crafted items and are not really meant for everyone unless you really work at it or are prepared to pay handsomely out of pocket for it.
Regular crafting armor however made with standard materials was readily available to everyone, it did the job but if you wanted to go the extra mile, you'd work harder for it.
If materials for every 'standard' type armor were easy to get, whether it's through a little gathering and whatnot, soulbinding is less painful. But if you had to farm for like 6 hours to get that one cloth for that one robe... That's a special form of torture.
I don't think the soul binding aspect of things would have worked well in early 1.0 when you had to pre-synth like 30 things just to make that one pair of pants, but now things are easier!
!)Ease of synthesis - We no longer need sub crafts to synth our items, thus making the whole process a lot less painless.
!)Materiuh! - This one can go either way, but the way they're setting it up now is so that people are forced to turn unwanted gear into materia. This has many pros and cons, a lot of people are on both sides of the fence on this one, a lot are saying 'well we already bought gear in 1.0 to spiritbond without being forced to' and I totally get you guys on that point, I was one of those too but I am not opposed to how they're making it play out in 2.0. I had so much useless gear that no one would buy in the end that I ended up spiritbonding the heck out of that too haha. On the plus side, I won't have to sit down and synth up like 60 belts to bond...or will I? ...I probably will.
Not being able to give away gear to friends that you no longer use is a bit of a ball-ache though, I gave away so much stuff especially when I didn't have time to craft, but most of the time I crafted anyway so this makes little difference to me. Though I will miss being able to mule stuff to my alt ;~;.
Another point that was brought up in the thread was droprates. I am a huge advocate for skill rewarding gameplay instead of luck, but as a true final fantasy game there has to be a luck element. I could be very wrong with my next point, please feel free to disagree/debate etc but I believe that things like primals, dungeons, storyline fights that yield drops should reward skill over luck. There's no fun for me in running the same dungeon 500 times only to see one of the items I wanted drop and then get passed to someone else even though I'd worked equally as hard. That being said, I believe that as frustrating as it is, materia should keep its luck element. Melded gear can/may out-do certain dungeon drops and if people want something above and beyond, they should work for it.
Sorry for long wall of ramblyness ;~;, I hope you all have a pleasant day!
Sorry - Edit, had another thought XD.
Content scaling - I know there are some players that call for certain fights to be dumbed down, kinda like in XI when they nerfed CoP in the end so that everyone could blast through it. Until then, the gear was difficult to obtain for some, and out of reach for others -as it should be. Rewarding based on skill was pretty awesome, but as they dumbed that down new content came around that was harder, so the 'casual?' (I am not sure if that's the correct term, feel free to choose another! lol) players that didn't have the sheer volumes of time to perfect a fight were now able to complete content albeit a bit later.
I'm a large advocate for this in XIV - hard content to begin with but then maybe even years later, dumb down the old stuff so lesser skilled players can still complete it but then bring about harder fights and keep that cycle going.
Sorry for more ramblies m(_ _)m lol