SMN - Why it is not a very interesting job and not a good upgrade from ACN

[Kevee]

we're supposed to be "enfeeble magic users",

Source?

Or is this another biased predisposition from a prior FF you particularly enjoyed?

Because this is the lore from the main website:

The beast tribes of Eorzea worship and summon forth beings known as primals, among which are Ifrit, Garuda, and Titan. Yet what is a god to one man is a demon to another, for the city-states of Eorzea see these beings as a grave threat to their collective survival.
In times immemorial, there lived mages who had not only the power to summon the primals, but also the means to transmute the primals' essences, thus binding them to their will. Known simply as summoners, the existence of these men and women and their arcane art have been all but lost to the ages.

I'm still waiting for someone to answer these:

What is a Summoner? Why is the FFXIV Summoner, not a Summoner?

Nobody has been able to answer except for personal anecdotes.

Want to know why? There is no defined Summoner. There is no, "THIS is a Summoner!"

They have all been vastly different, both mechanically and from a lore stand point, not to mention mechanically a "Summoner" using summons has never been optimal, or sometimes intended, in their actual gameplay(Eiko/Garnet from IX, for example. They have summons, but it's more of a "side" to them).


With that in mind, I'll ask for an answer again.

What is a Summoner? Why is the FFXIV Summoner, not a Summoner?

Don't answer with personal anecdotes or rhetoric. "It was more pet-based in XI!"
1) This isn't XI.
2) Summons were different in XI compared to all other FFs. Never saw someone complain there, especially when they were all very weak for a very long time(except for every 2 hours). There wasn't some big uproar about being a worse WHM, so why is there this uproar here?