While thinking about the other 2 melee DPS and one of the issues that plague melee in general of just being on the front lines and risk getting hit by aoe, it got me to have an idea on a little bit of a different way to go about DPSing with a melee.
DRG and MNK both do positional attacks from the side and behind, but never the front. My idea would be to have DRK be a job that will occasionally jump in the front of the fight to do attacks, going as far as absorbing some to increase their own damage.
The idea behind it stems on the idea of making DRK the DPS job for GLA. They would use shield and swords and be in line with more classical FF dark knights (think Cecil from FFIV). They would utilize heavy armor and a decent health pool to help keep them alive up close to mobs. GLA already has good defensive cool downs too which would aide them in surviving, especially if they need to be in front of a mob and be at risk of eating frontal attacks. So between Sentinel, Bulwark, Convalescence, and Rampart you got a sturdy melee.
I'm not terribly creative with abilities, so someone better than I could fill in the gaps here but a few ideas I had for what they could do is say have an ability where they would have a cover-esque ability which they could pop on the tank to help absorb a little damage off them, which coupled with a cooldown would mean they effectively reduce damage taken, and then they could then have either the damage taken (maybe have it calculated before damage reduction?) is sent back at the enemy in some form (dark wave?).
The general idea behind this is merely having a DPS class with the mentality of "Fight the enemy head on!", rather than always cowering behind and stabbing them in the backs.
I also think it'll be a nice change of pace from the XI DRK everyone seems to want to just copy and paste. Bring something new and fresh to the game I say.