Well evidently you must not be taking certain fights into account or cherry picking the ones that validate your point. I wonder if you started before or after all the nerfs to dynamis because there was definitely strategy involved with killing back then and many other fights that take precedence in challenge over this , IMO. I am also curious if anyone in here actually helped on the Pandy fight before SE started nerfing everything after that 18 hour fight to chime in how much easier it was vs the end game today.
I pulled Dynamis and farmed my Mandau over a 1.5 year period of living in my mother's basement living and breathing FFXI, so I'm aware of what Dynamis was like. There was strategy involved in pulling (to the tune of: Don't link too much ***) otherwise you had BLM's nuke statues and melee zerg one at a time. That's actually almost exactly how this months intense ambuscade works, actually.
I'm not really sure you can quantify old school dynamis as being terribly difficult as a general rule, as Shiva (and I'm sure many other servers) had a LS that would enter with 64 people and just zerg the *** out of the zone twice a week.
I can't speak of Pandy Warden, as I had quit for that era, though.
I hold that most endgame of yesteryear was difficult because we didn't have a full understanding of mechanics or didn't have proper ways to mitigate them. DT sets were barely a thing in original endgame for non-tanks (oh wait, did we even use melee in endgame in the back in the day? Ehhhhhhhh...) and now DT sets are absolutely required for all jobs and knowing how to use them is very closely linked to how "good" you are.