They were both easily tanked by a SAM/NIN eventually, but yeah.
Thus why they had to come up with new ideas. You're not making much of a case for this thread.

I don't mind "gimmicky" special abilities as long as they don't unfairly target certain jobs to be left behind, e.g. making some monster magic immune most of the time, or auras that completely debilitate either melees or mages or certain jobs in particular. Basically, there should always be more than one reasonably plausible way of winning.