Risk is fine if there's a reward for it. The problem is there isn't much to gain from it. BST master DPS is pretty low, probably not that much better than I do as a relic summoner, because they have basically no combat traits beyond their support job. To use their pet abilities efficiently requires them to lose TP and thus lose potential weapon skills, constraining their DPS potential. If BST is to be a risky job, then it needs to have better damage output than other jobs with better survivability skills. And as it stands, it really doesn't. I don't know a single person who's ever sought a BST for their party, citing their superior DPS.
This is all aside from the fact that even people who already were meleeing as BST are inconvenienced (to put it mildly) by the changes that were made. If they wanted to eliminate pet kiting they could have done so without causing a large amount of frustration for people that were already doing it the way SE intended. And it only went so far in discouraging pet kiting / playing from a distance. As was said by others, you could still play the old way with relative safety with the right sub job, running in to do commands and running back out. They didn't really even eliminate the style of play they were trying to stop- they just made it a lot more inconvenient.