Most people that complain about it are clickers who never bothered to learn how to keybind.
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If it was just 1-2-3 it would be fine. Nobody is asking for 1-1-1. What we have a problem with is when it is, in reality, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0-alt1-alt2-alt-3, etc. Most jobs require 3 full hotbars of buttons. That is neither possible nor fun for me, and that is why I use macros to stack skills.
I have an MMO mouse, and a Azeron Cyborg and still find this game has extra buttons just to have extra buttons. To me, PvP not only has more interesting abilities, but also more class identity since the rework, which shows you do not need excessive buttons to have a well design and fun class flow.
I think pvp has interesting abilities and better class identity, but it is very bare. In PVE no job actually requires 3 full hot bars, and about 25% of your skills are for niche situations that you likely do not need on your hot bar and about 25% of skills that could be combined to 1 key or an upgrade of a skill. I would probably say that about 45% of button bloat is people being unintelligent enough to set up better keybinds for there classes. If you are using 1-0 button bloat isn't the problem your keybinding is. I would not mind seeing the class identity from PvP go into PvE.
Sounds like you just need to practice more, before stepping into more difficult content spend like 2 hours hitting a target dummy. Once it's second nature and you can do your correct rotation step into extreme and work up. I main sam/reaper and play on ps4 controller, it toke hours of practice before I was ready for savage/ultimate. I don't know if you care about your dps but macro's effect your gcd. I'm curious what job you play because my dancer has half the abilities as sam ever consider re-rolling?
This might be a GNB specific thing but for me - the fact that I want to enter into no mercy with three cartridges + at least keen edge "banked" means that my rotation is going to involve hitting 1 - NM, all my damage abilities - 23 + burst strike, if I want to fit everything I can into no mercy. And sometimes after my gnashing fang combo, if I'm not paying attention I can autopilot going back to 1 instead of hitting 2 or 3 like I should be, resulting in a pretty severe dps loss. Collapsing my standard 123 into a single button would completely remove my capacity to ever make that error, and I wouldn't exactly be thrilled about that.
But if SE absolutely has to remove "button bloat" I hope they do that before removing anything else.
The difficulty in a job is NOT to press 1, 2 and 3 in sequence. Except in the few classes that have extended, non-linear combos and you need to combine them (SAM/MNK for instance).
In a DRG, for instance, the difficulty of the job is learning when to enter Life of the Dragon, remembering to apply all oGCDs when necessary and not missing out, choose which combo to apply, and lining up with buffs. The difficulty of the job is NOT learning how to press 1-2-3 in sequence.
The 2 main combos and the AoE combo could safely be folded into a button, while leaving "Wheeling Thrust" and "Fang and Claw" out, while retaining everything that's interesting from the job, and allowing controller players to have a better time.
I do not think PvE should be as bare as PvP is. PvP just shows that you don't need tons of buttons to have strong class identity and engaging gameplay. Button bloat comes down to feeling. As I said I have an azeron 20+ buttons within less than a centimeter of my finger and an MMO mouse and I still feel button bloat exists in PvE. Maybe if that bloat lead to classes being rather unique rather than homogenized, I'd feel different, but it doesn't.