Windower was most definitely cheating once you went past its ability to allow alt-tabbing, but it was also prime in an era of MMOs where players were hungry for features SE couldn't or just plain wouldn't produce. With their combat system effectively designed around mass gear swapping, exceeding the game's in-game macro system was simply the next logical step of compressing numerous button presses into one. Coincidentally, this may also be why most MMOs nowadays prevent gear swapping, even if partially, within combat. Mechanically, I can understand why they chose that path. "RP"-wise, it also makes sense to not be constantly changing your pants mid-battle. Aside from difficulty of detection, I suspect SE ultimately let Windower slide because alt-tab was highly desired and the extended macros only enabled something players could normally do with a bit more ease.
Things are arguably more dicey nowadays. Certain features like notifications about weather changes may be more QoL, but there's still an advantage others might not have if you're in a location where elementals are a threat. Even gear swapping goes conditionally deeper, swapping certain things if specific buffs are active or not. But yeah, other things like remaining buff durations are also QoL, though can still lead to a "better" player as a result of being better poised to not let buffs drop while being most resource efficient about it, i.e. casting Refresh on someone with about 3s remaining instead of earlier or after it wears. Now, some might argue Windower enabled other things like radars, speed/position hacking, and so on, but that's not entirely true. But it is true that current Windower is delving deeper into the shady territory with directly interpreting packets and even creating its own to do things that weren't possible years ago. Some may be "okay" with this by virtue of XI being an older game and SE no longer seeming to care, but just as with my feeling on add-ons, sometimes players really don't need what eventually shows up. There's a fine line between convenience and crutch, which is also why you see some folks freak out post-patch when some things stop working.
There are possible bright spots to this, though. While XI may not give you precise distances, they did go on to modify targeting arrows for abilities to give a visual indication as to whether or not something was in range and even if it was close to out of range. For casters, this helpful if you needed to be over 20 yalms away to avoid a mob's AoE, and for the longest time, console users or non-Windowers had nothing comparable. Realistically, this behooves any dev to listen to their players for improvements big and small and to perhaps avoid the trainwreck that was eventually XI's "official" window mode, what with its terrible performance issues and compromising graphic quality.
Stepping away from Windower stuff, though, there is something key I hadn't mentioned or don't readily recall other people bringing up when it comes to the expectations of hardware, and that is the minimum system requirements. FPS-mongers may declare their games unplayable at 24-30 FPS, but I'm going to posit that untrue. Stronger hardware will allow better performance, yes, but I'd say the hard line is drawn at the level where the lowest setting at the lowest possible configurations, maybe with a bit of wiggle room, run smoothly. So, for PC, that means your basic mouse, keyboard, monitor, speakers, and tower.
Mingling issues like other hacks with gaming mice/keyboards is a bit of a red herring, though. I doubt Razer is about to start packet sniffing XIV so one could run around and mine unattended or multi-box raid. Yes, someone more patient enough could manually map out directions from a default camera angle, how long a button should be pressed, and maybe even where, but that's not going to be your majority user. Such is why I'm downplaying the threat despite understanding potential advantages. Less scrupulous methods are another animal entirely.
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