DRK being compared to past FF games.

[Krr]

It had several abilities that either debuffed or directly hurt yourself to increase your damage DRK was a DPS by design, not by community usage.

Nothing in FFXI was consciously designed around trinity. That's the point.

DRK was a heavily armored class with the ability to use either big swords and scythes or a sword and shield (though the community found this a useless feature, not the designers designing it) that could situationally (due to, let's face it, the long-ass cooldowns on every JA in FFXI) harm itself to deal more damage. Thanks to FFXI's flexible job and subjob system, the community (and no one else! no one actually making the game!) figured out how to break this to make DRK capable of outputting high damage with its high-hate abilities without actually drawing said hate. If DRK in FFXIV is a heavily armored job with a large weapon that can use lots of debuffs and situationally harm itself for benefits then it hasn't sacrificed any "thematic" it had from FFXI other than the ability to make Epic Big Numbers appear in the combat log.