Have put over 400 hours in the game, and I'm sure I'll be playing for years to come.
As someone who never played FFXIV, my impressions of the game's music in FBL was initially extremely negative. I liked most of the music that was in Curtain Call, which I think was mostly from ARR, but the stuff from the expansions has a pretty... different feel. In most songs with vocals, the vocals are recorded and mixed (and in some cases composed and/or performed) very poorly. I don't see how anyone can listen to "Rise" and not cringe— it's like a c-tier 3d Sonic song that they payed some guy $50 on fiverr to mix (and they put TWO versions of it in the game!). Other songs are just bad imitations of genres that I don't really like, i.e. Oblivion is a bad Avril Lavigne knockoff.
As happens with most music, the more you listen to it, the more you like it, and by now I can say that there are only a few FF14 songs that bother me in the game (still amazed by the terribleness of Rise). I've even come to like some songs that I initially hated, like A Long Fall and Exponential Entropy.
But now for the song selection— I eventually listened to the whole original Uematsu soundtrack and the ARR soundtrack, and was surprised to find that they're both full of bangers (especially the Uematsu one). So I'd agree with the basic idea that the song selection wasn't great in FBL, since they clearly picked songs based on being tied to important moments in the game, rather than their quality (IMO). But that's sort of how it has to be. As much as I'd love to have some of the great tracks that no one remembers from the game, they're obviously going to pick the ones that play in major boss battles and story moments, even if some of them are terrible. Also it's clear to me that FF14 players just have very different taste in music than I do (maybe just because their ears have been beaten down by hundreds of hours of playing the game). Like the fact that Rise is universally praised by FF14 players will always amaze me. So from what I can tell, they picked the right songs to make most FF14 players happy, and with over 30 songs I don't think it's really reasonable to complain.
My personal unreasonable complaint is that the entire FF8 soundtrack needs to be in the game. Every single track.
