This topic has been beaten to death. Weaving makes perfect sense given the mechanics of the combat system.

Light attacks were coded to have their own separate global cooldown to abilities. This allows players to do both light attacks and ability casts in parallel without getting caught up in each other's global cooldowns, it's hard to believe this was done for any reason other than a conscious design choice. We'll never know for sure of course, but seeing how ZOS has supported it and designed sets that utilize it, it was either an intentional design choice or a happy accident, but it's here to stay.

Animation cancelling is a whole nother can of worms. Animation canceling wouldn't even be a thing if ZOS would follow their own rules for instant cast abilities. Once again it's about the global cooldown, but this time it's the players making sure the game follows the rules. The global cooldown is a standardized period of time you have to wait between using abilities. As such, instant cast abilities should be able to be used in succession only limited by the global cooldown. The problem is that some instant cast ability animations actually take longer to play out than the global cooldown, thus artificially creating a longer delay between ability castings. Animation cancelling simply clips off the excess animation, it doesn't let people cast more frequently than the global cooldown allows but rather just eliminates excess animation time beyond the global cooldown duration which shouldn't exist. Players want a standardized fair combat system, and a class having overly lengthy animations creating arbitrary delays in casting that exceeds the gobal cool down is rightfully frowned upon and that's why players have circumvented that extra delay.

If ZOS would fix animations for instant cast abilities so they don't drag on longer than the global cooldown, animation cancelling wouldn't even exist in its current form

I somehow don't care about weaving, been doing it instinctively since long. At least, I care less than ani cancel, which I despise and one of the reason I stopped this game over guild wars 2. This and the stun immune system.

Ani cancel should stay! It's a good thing to be able to brain your opponent or be able to dodge after a key pressed a bit too fast... BUT the damages inherent to the skill cancelled shouldn't be counted! You don't finish your animation because you CANCELLED it, then no damages... That's as simple as that. I suspect the action to be sent to the server as soon as the key is pressed but to me, it should be as soon as the animation is fully finished. Event tho I can't really guess how they handle this dispite being a software engineer.

The little thing I don't get is.. While I understand that ani cancel is healthy for a good gameplay, I don't get why the pro ani cancel want the damages from the skill pressed. They still can have their fast paced gameplay and skilled gameplay without those, while anti ani-cancel would be happy to be able to see the skills performed by the oppenent if not brained by a smart dodge or bar swap. The skill gap would still be there. Because if what the Pro ani cancel want is their damages as fast as possible, a ragdoll with no animations at all on all the skills would perform as well as ani cancel if not better! Would that be fun to them?

I REALLY want to come back to eso since this game has a lot of good things, but unless this hasn't been changed with the stun and stun immunity mechanics allowing 10 chickens running after a guy without having him to die, I'll just stick to guild wars 2, which as a awesome combat and good classes identity.