Personal agency has several key elements. First, it is about giving players choice while allowing their decision not to result in a predefined action that occurs irrespective of that choice. In personal loot or FFA only loot, loot drops by RNG.
If you only have FFA loot and not a choice of FFA or personal loot, by definition you are removing choice and player agency. Hence, point 1 is false. Moreover, FFA only loot essentially forces players to change their behavior to click fast/stop attacking monster to have an opportunity to get good drops, assuming everyone is playing legitimately. This removes player agency.
If players are cheating/botting/pickit/ninja looting users, the good loot is not obtainable or very difficult to obtain, therefore legitimate gameplay is punished in a FFA system.
To illustrate your logical fallacy. Consider this scenario of a 3 player game. Player 1 clears map 1 at the same time as player 2 clears map 2 in their entirety. Player 3, the leecher, sits in town. In a personal loot game, player 1 only gets the loot from map 1 (where they did all the killing) while player2 gets all the loot in map 2 where they did all the killing. Player 3, the town leecher, gets nothing. Now in an FFA game, the leecher can go to map 1 and map 2 and collect all the uncollected gear. This is inherently unfair and proves why FFA can lead to inequity. Specifically, the leecher does not even need to present when a monster dies to get gear in FFA.
What you call participation trophies completely misses the fact that more than one player is contributing. Lets say two players are doing the killing with 6 leechers. Using your logic (not mine), why should one person who only did half the killing be able to click on all the loot instead of half?
Multiboxing benefits both personal loot and FFA loot. In a FFA loot game, the multiboxers can get all (or almost alll) the loot and not half. Therefore, FFA only can be far worse.
True. In one world (FFA), you can have cheats/thieves/ninja looters ruining the experience for legitimate players. In the better world, legitimate players who contribute are guaranteed a loot reward for their efforts.
In terms of difficulty, FFA only players see 8X the drops of personal loot players. Therefore, the personal loot game is theoretically harder as they can not get more than their fair share.
I expect is a personal opinion. Let’s not kid ourselves. Why di you decided to carry the group in the first place. Was it because you get 4.5X xp and 6X higher total loot drops by the presence of the “leechers”. In fact, you want all the good 6X rewards. Who is leeching from whom? If this wasn’t the case, point #5 would not have been made.
If you are defining the rules for everyone in your private games, you can simply tell everyone to hand over all good drops. Again you are not limited to 1/8 of drops and by the way, the baseline total drops have gone up 6X.