The argument"MCH/Bard have utility so their damage should be lower"

[RiceisNice]

You're right shoulder tackle isn't a gap closer... There is no fight in this game where you are running back and forth off of the boss w/o being able to hit anything for extended periods of time. The closest I can think of is chrysalis. Dragoons have a couple gap closers.

Shoulder tackle has no range requirement either, its more reliable to close in on enemies.

And even then, monks now have meditation with forbidden chakra to reduce their damage loss from downtimes...and both DRG and NINs have ranged abilties. While not feasible or TP friendly, it's certainly something for them so they aren't doing 0 dps during those times (which as of recent content and even FCoB, are very few)

But it doesn't work this way. Every fight has unique mechanics and issues for every job. If monks lose stacks it hurts them a lot. Fights like ravana are fantastic for jobs like BLM because of the dedicated burn phases and their ability to disregard his reflection shields. But on fights with lots of movement BLM suffer terribly. These are the numbers that matter, and they vary wildly on an encounter-by-encounter basis..

Which is why monks have gotten more tools to help offset their shortcomings. If the enemy is going to bugger off to the point where your GL will fall off (and this usually requires a circumstance where ranged also has no uptime on it), they can do tornado kick. If its somewhere inbetween where the boss does come back in time for a GCD, you could just form shift to coeurl and immediately snap punch or demolish and refresh it. Nor has the maintenance of GL ever stopped monks from pulling high numbers (with the except of t9, but fuck t9)