Quote Originally Posted by Alhanelem View Post
BST is barely more of a melee class than the other pet jobs. It gets some more heavy armor gear options (though most of those options don't help your pet), but it's still not super sturdy like a PLD or WAR.
I liked and agreed with your whole post, but I snipped this line because it is particularly salient. I think you convey the confusing messages on the job change well.

For six years, we played BST as a mage job. I was on a BST-only LS on Remora, and the LS chat was always talking about MP-gear, how to get star-necklace from quest, how great lamia-mantle+1 was for MP, etc.etc. When you started levelling BST, the first thing they told you was "level WHM sub." You had to actually level WHM37 before you even started levelling your BST. Nobody levelled WAR or other melee subs, and most people played BST/WHM full-time, with occasional BST/NIN in events, but that was only for shadows, not the dual-wield.

BST was built around this idea that the master is super-squishy, and out in the wilderness when you solo or low-man, you needed /WHM and you need as much MP gear as you can get. Obviously the arrival of /DNC changed all jobs to a certain extent, and the level 75+ era changed BST itself completely, and ILVL gear made all jobs quite uniformly Robocop. But underlying it was really that the beastmaster was a kind of wilderness druid, a mage job with axes and a natural affinity with all wild beasts. There was never a suggestion that this job was a front-line soldier type of job, and in the 2004~2010 years the BST job was actually a master of white magic, carefully using MP and spells to stay safe while the charmed beasts did the fighting almost out of visual range.

I think this is the problem, the job has changed so much, and the ilvl game is so different, that the original core nature of jobs have struggled to adapt. Sometimes SE will try to help jobs adapt, by changing them stronger/weaker, but what we are left with is some of the original jobs trying to play outside of their comfort zone.