The fact that no one cares about AV because of how it was designed, to me, is a problem in of itself. It speaks of a severe disconnect between developer and player, and is in every way a bad thing to have.
My thing here, with Absolute Virtue, is that I see a company fixing a badly designed boss with an even worse designed fix. Couldn't they have just made Absolute Virtue immune to HP Drain? I'm to understand that Square-Enix has fully intended this boss to be beatable - apparently videos are floating around of the dev team fighting and beating it, except with the actual strategy parts missing or blurred out. If it's fully intended to be beatable, and yet no one's beating it without gamebreakers in 4 years, there is something very wrong there, and it turns a lot of people off. The whole Pandemonium Warden thing was very much bad press, in the terms that several dozen potential customers went "Wait, this game has bosses like THAT? No way, I don't want to play that"
Now, sooner or later, someone's going to bring up WoW and it's balance issues, so I'll state my opinion on that now.
WoW (Vanilla, to the latest patch before Burning Crusade:) A mess. The head designer is a man who goes by "Tigole", if memory serves. He headed one of the super uber hardcore guilds in Everquest. Every time new content would come out, they'd rip through it in seconds, and demand anything harder - and the developers would comply. 0.1% of the playerbase was being catered to, at the severe expense of the other 99.9%. He heads (headed?) design for WoW, and in turn, the best, brightest, flashy most hurty stuff was for that 1%, leaving the other 99% of us wondering what we were doing
Burning Crusade (up to the latest patch): Now we're getting somewhere. Someone internally realized that catering to 1% meant that 99% of the people are thinking about not giving you money. There are still hard things to do, but it doesn't require hours upon hours upon HOURS of raiding, discarding all that's fun about the game to make your numbers higher, and watching the clusterfuck of 40 people listening to a 12 year old with a Napoleon complex.
Wrath of the Lich King (Beta): The hard stuff is still there, but it's very clear Blizzard realizes they made a mistake basing the game off of Everquest (Cater to TEH HARDCOERS ONLEY) and are very much working to keep the actual large playerbase (Those who play it for 2-3 hours a night)
Full disclosure: 70 Mage, Played Beta, quit halfway into Burning Crusade. Did PvP up until Knight rank, did Blacksmithing/Engineering, raided Molten Core & Onyxia.
So yeah, I guess at the core of my argument is that I have a severe problem with too much content designed for a fraction of a fraction of the player base. Nothing against hard challenges, but some of it is just God damned ludicrous.