Y'shtola saves Lyse from getting diced by Zenos, they talk in one of the written side stories where they have lunch with I think Krile (or some other female Scion member) also there, and like one or two exchanges where Lyse worries for Y'shtola's recovery after Zenos sliced her. That's about the extent of it.
Tbh, I know it all just comes down to personal interpretations but I feel like his insistence on wanting to travel with you and share your burdens and so forth is a deliberate choice on the writer's part to let you decide for yourself whether you want to husbando him or not. Husbando/waifu culture does help in selling merch, after all. I obviously can't know if it's really a deliberate choice, but if I were trying to get sales numbers up I'd go for it.
Take away superbolide and just give GNB another defensive. I'm serious - the amount of fucking GNBs who slam this when I put excogitation on them prepull leads me to believe that the people who play this job can't be trusted with an invuln.
Your friend's got way more tolerance for that kinda crap than you, doesn't make you immoral. Sometimes I'm just not going to stomach shitty play and I'd rather drop out or try to kick the source of trouble. People who AFK moments into a dungeon irritate the hell out of me.
I'm not out here dropping every party, just the horrific ones that are going to make me salty and likely to type mean words into the chat.
The game has a 30 minutes penalty. If you don't like the group and they're disrespecting your time, you should move on.
The game by design doesn't intend to waste your time, beyond what a video game normally does anyway, but community by itself is not a fully controllable part of the design process. Frankly compared to most MMOs, FFXIV (unless you truly don't give a shit about the plot) doesn't waste your time even close to the extent most MMOs do. I've played a good chunk of MMOs, and FFXIV by its design doesn't waste my time, but boy does the community in anything beyond the MSQ difficulty make up for that design decision. At least in NA/EU, I know JP has its shit more together but that is probably a cultural thing.
Finding people? No. Finding people who can consistently clear? Yes.
I ended up sticking with FF because of the ease of finding non committal PUG groups, so I hope they don't kill it completely.
Finding people isn't difficult. Finding people in time slots that are convenient for you is what's difficult. I find that there's not enough population to support various time frames, despite what people might say about the game's popularity.
FFXIV has always been this way. Back in Stormblood, you would be told by the raiding community to find a static to "avoid the PF shitters". Due to the nature of the 2-chest lockout, people who clear with their static don't tend to help in Party Finder.
The schedule gets old if the group isn't doing well. It feels more like an interruption and a chore than something fun that you're doing. My experience is you end up with a group that has various expectations. That doesn't tend to work out well because FFXIV players by and large haven't learned how to behave like functioning adults. Screaming at other people because you can't parse or because you're not happy with the group's progression is childish.
This is probably the biggest problem. That and the drama. Even an 8 man raid team has enough people for cliques to form and you'll find yourself out on your ass quickly if you dare to bring up the consistently bad performance of the shitter grey parsing tank that the group leader insists on keeping in the group.
Even better when it's a shit DPS who isn't even out-parsing the Tanks but wants to complain about everyone else. And everyone else is too scared of conflict to tell him to fuck off.