Yes game feel is hard to quantify sometimes. There have been games that on paper I should adore, but in practice I struggled to enjoy. Bastion and Hyper Light Drifter are two - beautiful presentation, but the controls and gameplay feel just didn't click for me personally.
I play FFXIV and I'm not sure what the quote is referring to but in general I think it has a very good feel. They made a conscious choice to decouple animations from hits, meaning they can go nuts with extensive and flashy animations but your job is to just not be in the ground AOE marker when it vanishes - if you didn't get out in time you are hit, regardless of how long the following animation takes or whether you've walked a few steps since. This has a learning curve and confuses new players so should be explained better, but it makes for snappier gameplay and tighter movement patterns at the higher skill levels once you get it. Top raids are very much a dance of positioning, movement, and maximising uptime, which I enjoy a lot.
To the contrary (referring to ugly old MMOs) I also enjoyed FFXI and that was anything but quick and precise, the battle log itself was delayed and sluggish and abilities only came out every few minutes if you weren't a caster. I'm not sure what it was, but I think it was that feeling of overcoming a challenge in a group (or the challenge of just finding a group!) and the ability to break the rules by beating enemies with 2 skilled people instead of a full group. I revisited it recently and still mostly enjoyed it, so it's not just a case of it being the best we could do back then.
I play FFXIV and I'm not sure what the quote is referring to but in general I think it has a very good feel. They made a conscious choice to decouple animations from hits, meaning they can go nuts with extensive and flashy animations but your job is to just not be in the ground AOE marker when it vanishes - if you didn't get out in time you are hit, regardless of how long the following animation takes or whether you've walked a few steps since. This has a learning curve and confuses new players so should be explained better, but it makes for snappier gameplay and tighter movement patterns at the higher skill levels once you get it. Top raids are very much a dance of positioning, movement, and maximising uptime, which I enjoy a lot.
To the contrary (referring to ugly old MMOs) I also enjoyed FFXI and that was anything but quick and precise, the battle log itself was delayed and sluggish and abilities only came out every few minutes if you weren't a caster. I'm not sure what it was, but I think it was that feeling of overcoming a challenge in a group (or the challenge of just finding a group!) and the ability to break the rules by beating enemies with 2 skilled people instead of a full group. I revisited it recently and still mostly enjoyed it, so it's not just a case of it being the best we could do back then.