SMN got a lot better with expansion, they were any a pretty poor place in fcob, I hardly ever saw them. It's really about the mobility.

FYI there are some decent hotbar swapping macro commands that may help save some space. It's been forever since I've played SMN and can't give you anything specific off the top of my head. You can review the commands in the macro menu, look at the /crosshotbar command and see if you can figure out some abilities that may be able to be swapped on the fly. Ex I have macros for warrior that swap inner beast with fell cleave and steel cyclone with decimate so it uses the same 2 buttons instead of 4 different slots, very nice for controller playing. Here's the thread for reference: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...Stance-Dancing

It's kinda funny I just noticed a comment "WAR - discovering SMN macros since 2015.", hopefully you can get some use out of it