Job Stones vs. Weapons — Why Do We Still Have Both Locking Our Jobs?

The game has a lot of good ideas that have fallen to the wayside. The item based tiered class/ job system is just another of those. It's more expedient to just add the job and skip the intervening weapon-based class. The implication is that those hypothetical classes probably exist in the world, but we're bypassing them by jumping straight to the second tier. The scholar/ summoner split also implies that other classes can have multiple second tier jobs... Which is vanishingly unlikely to happen, mostly for balance and devopment reasons, but the idea is intriguing.

Who changes jobs by switching weapons instead of using the gear set list? Do you equip every piece of gear manually when you change jobs?