I never even considered limited jobs to be something like this. I'm against the current concept of them but very intrigued by non combat limited jobs. Good idea!
I certainly HOPE SE doesn't listen to the OP and continues with their plans. Not everyone wants 'group play' and the addition of solo content is an awesome thing for a HUGE number of players. Furthermore, there is still coming a 'group play' new job with 5.0... so for players like me it's great to see SE adding something for the solo players, which many people don't seem to realize are a HUGE population in this game... and thankfully SE is finally seeing the reality of this.
A question for those in favor of Limited Jobs specifically because they want more solo content. Let's take a moment to imagine that Blue Mage was announced as a normal job. Following its announcement, Masked Carnival was announced as a new solo activity that allowed all jobs to participate. Would you still be advocating that Blue Mage should be restricted from participating in endgame content?
The point I'm trying to make here is that this sought after solo content didn't have to be created at the expense of a beloved job. In the scenario I described, you have Blue Mage as a new job and it can participate in this new solo activity called the Masked Carnival. The key difference between the scenario described here and the one SE gave us is that the scenario provided by SE restricted a job from participating in endgame content.
Jobs do not have to be made Limited for SE to create new solo content.
You realise nobody is arguing for the removal of the Masked Carnivale, right? It would definitely be possible for a class to have two different skillsets, a balanced one for group content and an unbalanced one for fun (After all, EVERY class already has two sets of actions, because of PvP)
Bards do not get locked out of raids despite having Perform, so why would BLU be locked?
Also, except for the Masked Carnivale, all other "solo content" that BLU will supposedly bring is already in the game. Nothing prevents you from playing any class in the open world, or solo old dungeons. Hell, some classes will probably do it better than BLU.
On top of that, one of the best pieces of solo content in the game is PotD/HoH. And BLU is locked out of both of those.
Guess what will happen after that (you know it will.) ?
"Why is BLU the only job with bonus content ?!"
"Where is my Dragoon's Carnivale ?"
And if SE starts adding some kind of solo content to other jobs...(would probably take time and will not release them all at once.)
"Why are you adding the solo content for X and not for Y ?"
"How long till Z job has the same content than W ? This is unacceptable !"
I don't think a lot of people are saying that BLU had to be made this way for us to get solo content, that said a lot of people are disregarding the fact that up until the announcement the only official mention of BLU was that it wouldn't work as a standard job in 14's tight framework.
To me it feels like they simply tried to address two issues with one action.
-People want more solo content
-People want BLU
So they created solo content and used BLU so that in some form BLU made it in.
People have used the "assist trophy" term on BLU but while that's used as an insult, assist trophy's were used to include things that were not going to make it in anyway and it was a means to give them some form of inclusion, this is pretty much the same.
Now could they make BLU work? Sure anything could be made to work, they could add in Beast Tamer right now, only it doesn't have pets and uses guns, anything can be twisted and crammed into anything else, but they wanted to do something different, aim to let BLU break some systems but that came at being excluded from some things.
While that is being "limited" all our normal jobs are also limited, they've been changed (in most cases) stripped back in order to fit into the system, BLU isn't limited in that regard and simply limited in another way.
Finally, we just don't know enough, this whole limited job system is totally new and SE's isn't sure how it's all going to work in practice, which is likely why it'll start out down at 50 and be increased later so they can see how things play out as they adjust it.
BLU and any limited jobs after may never be allowed to do current content but perhaps eventually they'll be allowed at the least to simply be kept one major patch behind, we simply don't know.
I think that's a bit unfair to say, perform gave birth to an entire SUB community of people recreating songs. It's pretty good content if you ask me.