I'm going to contest you on one of your points, and I'm saying this as a PLD main and someone who was very much looking into turning my secondary from DRG to MNK near the end of HW. SAM is a lot like BLM; it's easy/simple to get into and start learning, but it has a lot of CD juggling and planning to really churn out its massive DPS consistently. If you're going to gripe about SAM's big numbers, you may as well gripe about BLM. Simple on paper, difficult in practice. You have to make sure your Sen don't overlap, you have to make sure certain buffs don't fall off, you have to make sure that your dot doesn't fall off, you have your Kenki management, and so on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0SaUWg9NSQ
There's more that goes into generating the DPS than you're giving credit for.
