Please reconsider stance on blue mage

[Duelle]

Dragoons, Summoners, and Beastmasters weren't discriminated against anymore than melee DPS were discriminated against when Garuda EX was first released. They weren't barred from doing content, they just had to potentially wait longer or make their own groups.

That's...what being discriminated against actually means. The community at large did not welcome those jobs. DRG was mislabeled as a gimp job between call wyvern having a 2 hour cooldown (when the wyvern was a part of DRG's overall DPS yet could die if anything sneezed in its general direction), SMN's avatars were largely useless because of how they were implemented (scaling with summoning skill helped a little bit but as I've said in the past, all that did is bring SMN up from the 5th sub-basement under the bottom of the barrel to the 3rd sub-basement of same) to the point the job was more useful to parties subbing WHM and spamming cures. BSTs were also pretty horrid because jug pets had fixed stats and levels and charm being temporary meant your extra party member could suddenly turn on you, and lol at you if the re-charm was resisted; not even getting into the perceived exp penalty (even when it was discovered the pentalty was BST-only, it's still horrible design because in a party setting you have a member that will eventually drag your party down due to leveling slower).

What we have now isn't even balance, it's just a sense of "sameness" that permeates every role except for the healers which actually do fulfill different niches at present.

What you call sameness is relative balance. We have actual parity between DPS jobs, healers and tanks. This means you don't see stupid things like everyone and their mom doing all BLM runs for primal fights (the way stacking BLMs made Garuda a joke in 1.0). I'm sure XI's PUPs, THFs and melee RDMs would love the be in an environment where their jobs have an equal chance of participating in content without special caveats or terrible gimmicks (see: Treasure Hunter and THFs) as the "real heroes" of that game (AKA the 6~ jobs that get brought to all content that matters).

You can try to demonize it but the sheer fact that I can put together a party with any set up of tanks, heals and DPS and still clear content already makes this game infinitely better than what XI could ever hope to offer for party content.