Why do people want Blue Mage in this game?

[Lemuria]

Hmm.. .No. it's actually because Yoshi-P wants all jobs to have access to the same number of skills. Giving SMN, for instance, 7-8 primals to choose from would give them more utility than the jobs that don't have access to primals.

A terribly poor example, since Egi's automatically give the summoner 4 new skills for the price of 1 slot, and the number of player-usable skills could still remain the same even with a larger number of summons. Again, lack of imagination.

There's a simple way to get around the 'number of skills' issue, and that's to simply limit the number of skills that can be set at any one time. Have a large pool to draw from, but a set number of slots, and specific skills to fit in each slot. This would allow the trademark Blue Mage customization without having more skills than other players. Naturally, this should only be interchangeable whilst in a sanctuary to avoid on-the-fly alterations.

I think one of the problems facing the game is that there is only one 'correct' way to play a job. There's little to no flexibility, which is a bad thing in an MMO where the players want to be individuals. Even the cross-class skills are highly limiting and nailed down to prevent experimentation. The sooner SE breaks out of their own prison, the sooner this game can get its own personality instead of borrowing flavours of other games.

[Ragology]

There's a simple way to get around the 'number of skills' issue, and that's to simply limit the number of skills that can be set at any one time. Have a large pool to draw from, but a set number of slots, and specific skills to fit in each slot. This would allow the trademark Blue Mage customization without having more skills than other players. Naturally, this should only be interchangeable whilst in a sanctuary to avoid on-the-fly alterations.

This could work. I guess the categories would be something like

Conal AOE (bad breath, overpower with wind up, gaze attack)
Self buff
360 AOE ( 1000 needles, self destruct)
Ranged AOE
Free slot

[Chasely]

A terribly poor example, since Egi's automatically give the summoner 4 new skills for the price of 1 slot, and the number of player-usable skills could still remain the same even with a larger number of summons.

It's not a terribly poor example at all. They get skills from said Egi, and in exchange, they have fewer class skills overall without said Egis. Also, Yoshi-P said himself that he didn't want to give sumoners more summons because that would upset the game's delicate skill balance. You can argue that he's silly for saying something like that, but we still don't have Ramuh, Moogle, Shiva or Leviathan egis, do we?