1) Thank you for actually translating this. (For those not aware, this was posted a week ago on the JP side, and probably only translated because I brought it up. If you'd prefer, you can pretend to remain in blissful ignorance.) It may not have any effect going forward, but at least we can see some of what was going on, instead of being left in the dark.

2) While I might sympathize slightly with pups, Stringing Pummel was already on par with Smite. Pups lose almost nothing here. Annalise, your analogy doesn't really work since it makes no effort to really understand the full math behind such calculations.

3) Overall, I can see where they're coming from in trying to balance between VS and the Impetus effect. Since changing Impetus would hurt a lot more people (and sorry pups, but there's about 10 times as many mnks as there are pups), bringing Smite down a little was the logical choice.

4) I'll agree that the point about mnks being chosen as Abyssea tanks is somewhat dodging the full reasons behind that (blue procs, high survivability), but you can't deny that very strong offensive power was also a significant part of the consideration. But that's merely an example point anyway. It seems more that they were trying to express the common player shunning of 'lesser' jobs. IE: If you have mnk, come mnk; I don't care what other jobs you have available.

5) I no longer have any expectations that the devs play the game. It's not feasible on a multitude of levels, and even if they did play, their mindset is completely different from players. They'd approach the game from the angle of "this is the way it 'should' be played" or "I already know what's supposed to be done here" instead of the player approach of maximal optimization and corner case exploitation.