What people want is for the work and effort the put into acquiring gear and materia for their character to have purpose or meaning. There is a negative psychological impact when you spend tens of millions of gil gearing out your tank character for battles, and you see that a character who has not spent such effort in their character capable of accomplishing the same feat with seemingly no difference in difficulty.

It is especially disheartening to see another class not designed for tanking, but instead to be a physically vulnerable class perform similarly.

For Ifrit specifically, I imagine the battle team was trying to make ifrit more powerful simply by increasing his Attack power. In doing so they were operating under the goal of making the battle more difficult. Most likely they did not spend much time considering the effect of the increased attack power, and how the equation that determines damage output would effect other classes.

In reality, the problem we're dealing with is much harder to fix than simply removing dlvl. It requires a much more sophisticated approach from the battle and battle-related teams.

If perhaps HP was reduced, it may not be necessary for a monster like Ifrit to have so much Attack, and thus the effect of Defense on Incoming Damage could be allowed to increase for that specific battle. But reduced HP also has effects on other parts of the game as well. I think Yoshi needs to be told to get a handle on this situation soon, to know that we want Stats to matter (not just some - we want choices to be based on strategy, not simply knowing that X stat is better than Y stat, so stack X stat). Having this addressed by 2.0 should be a priority otherwise we will continue to have issues with each battle that is added.