I simply ask you to consider that YOUR perspective is based on 'your gut feeling', whereas I'm not specifically claiming anything other than 'huh, a nontrivial number of people download and probably use these'. You 'not being in the group that does' does not trivialize their existence or impact.
I mean, I didn't say that none were interested in it. Just that a ton of people wouldn't care for it. I could easily see a million players throughout ff14's lifetime redownloading that plugging 18 times. But that 1mil would be out of potential dozens of millions in that same time period. Yes, obviously people will care about their dps and deep combat log, but that still doesn't deny the fact that the majority wouldn't care (I mean, potentially).
That 160k of MHW is roughly half of its players on steam. And MHW is a game build around complex pve afaik, so it'd make sense that more people would be interested in maximizing their output. But ff14 is mainly about their story, with a ton of other sources of entertainment in the game too. And AoC will be about a ton of pvp, artisan stuff and definitely some pve too, but if a few sources of pve will be beatable by just <10% (allegedly), I'd assume that around 20 maaaybe 30% would be at all interested in even trying. At which point probably the majority of them would need a tracker (though this still depends on the boss design).
In other words, yes, obviously there'll be people who only have 2 options, just like Noaani, but I highly doubt they'd be the majority. But at that point we're just back to the "do Intrepid want FF14's situation" question. Cause as you pointed out, even with ff14's attitude towards meters/addons, that pluggin still has 18kk downloads, even if they might've come from just a mil or two of people.
To clarify why this is something that I would care about relative to Ashes, then.
Ashes is supposed to be competitive. It has the potential to be quite acutely so, ESPECIALLY for builds.
The point being made is simple. If 2-5% of the total playerbase is using trackers, and 10% of the playerbase is what we would call 'competitively viable', that's between 1/5th and one half of the 'competitive' playerbase that have a speed-of-development advantage over the remaining.
What happens when the 'average' player knows that a competitive opponent has an advantage of this type? I can see that you would be fine 'just losing repeatedly because your opponents use their trackers and you prefer to do it the hard way', but we are not talking about you. We're talking about all the people who 'don't have time or the will to keep being at a disadvantage, but would still like to compete'.
You consider this connected to PvE, but MOBAs have parsers. Fighting games sometimes have parsers. Some even have 'parsers' built into the game by the developers because they know players will do related things.
I think I get what you and Mag are saying, that you don't care enough about the higher levels of competition to care if they exist or not, and believe that others don't either. That's fine, I think I just 'prefer that Ashes isn't ruled by those who are willing to have them' on average, and I expect that those who are not willing to have them, but are also not willing to just keep losing, have hard decisions to make.
I bet a ton of people will never care to even look them up if Intrepid don't add them to the game. And even if Intrepid do add them, some people will completely ignore them.