VW's current effort vs reward ratio sucks horribly, it was created for the super gamers who had "finished" abyssea and wanted to do something else.

All jobs are useful in abyssea, don't ever let someone tell you otherwise. Some jobs are more useful then others, the game has always been this way since it was created. In abyssea with crour buffs and atmas players can achieve near godlike status, basically we have the HP to survive the crazy moves the NMs can do. What you would of needed an alliance for you can now do in a group of 4~6 players. So naturally what happened is the gaming community found the absolute BESTEST BEST BEST 4~6 man setup possible to get their loot the fastest. Most of abyssea is procing, either red / blue or yellow depending what your after. In general your going to need to proc red for pretty much anything, even if its just to build the pop sets, a WAR and NIN can proc every red !! there is. DRK and PLD can also proc many red's, just not as much as WAR, DRG is missing raiden thrust and PLD is missing shadow of death, otherwise their the same for procs. NIN is the only job that can do Blade: Ei, but they can also do both of the GKT procs and the two dagger procs.

For yellow you want at a minimum a BLM (4/7 of the procs on all but light element). You want a WHM anyways for healing so they do all the light ones. Thus you have WAR + NIN + BLM + WHM as a perfect four man +2 farming group, their missing TH, BLU and BRD procs but otherwise they can mow through everything. There is heavy debate from the BLM's about /BRD, one on hand it gives them access to the BRD procs for 5/7, but it requires they use their 10min JA and completely disables them in the SJ category. Toss in a THF for a five man run and you can pretty much do everything like that.

Now lets get on the topic if blue procs, SE made the stupid decision of making them all time based, so from a certain time of day you have piercing, blunt, or slashing. Piercing is Dagger / Pole Arm / Archery / Markmanship, so immediately you would need a thf / dnc, a DRG and a RNG, seeing as the DRG and RNG don't fit into the above 4/5 man group, you'd have to split loot six ways. Slashing is worse, Sword (PLD for swift but BLU / DRK / WAR), Scyth (DRK), GKT (SAM), GAXE (WAR), AXE (WAR/BST), this requires that you bring lots more people then your absolutely required group and thus more competition for drops. Then you have blunt time, H2H (MNK / PUP), Club (WHM, everyone almost), Staff (everyone basically), pretty much bring a MNK and only pop during blunt time and your fine. MNK's also tank very well inside abyssea as atma's make them invincible for most NMs.

People are inherently greedy, they want all their loot and they want it not and do not want to share. There is more loot for four people then five, more for five then six, and lots more for six then 18. So everyone builds a group with the absolutely smallest number possible picking out the jobs that give them the most procs for the task at hand.

The alternative is to be in a solid shell, you do things in larger groups but because you have more members working together you can get more done faster. Pop NM's at all times rather then just blunt, finish an emp weapon in a week, things like that. Jobs like PLD / DRG / DRK / RNG / DNC seem to fit better inside bigger shells / groups as their used for multiple things.