PLD, WAR, & DRK balancing ideas

[DestroyerOfLargePlanets]

You said that in your opinion, dont let me misrepresent you, the more complex classes doing more DPS shouldn't continue as that forces competitive players into a meta and that is a bad thing. My posit to you was if you could name for me any competitive game that does not have a meta, which you conceded that you could not. That means two possible things; Either every competitive game that you or I can think of is doing something bad, or that metas are a natural development of competitive games and arent in fact bad.

IMO it's more like a combination of the two: metas are a natural development of competitive games and it's always a bad thing. It's bad, but unfortunately it's unavoidable. What can be done to combat that, however -- and we can see this in League of Legends for example -- are constant balancing tweaks to the various playable characters. These balancing tweaks aim to conserve a level playing field. But in any case, it's no use pursuing that train of thought; I think your next paragraph is much more interesting and I'd like to shift focus there.

My issue as stated is with an arbitrary increase in DPS in a mechanically simpler class like PLD.

I have an issue with that as well, but for different reasons which are irrelevant at this point. I mentioned it in my first comment on this thread iirc.

In practice however, I disagree that changing PLD is a good idea at all. That is because FFXIV does not only have a competitive player base. There needs to be high accessibility mechanically simpler jobs for low skill players. Those players exist, and vastly outnumber the competitive crowd. Making all the jobs equal in difficulty does one of two things: it isolates low skill players by not giving them the tools they need to grow or it waters down the competitive scene.

I get what you mean. SE needs to cater to both the competitive and the casual players so there appears to be a tradeoff when adjusting the difficulties of the tank classes. The question is: how do we adjust the difficulty of all tank classes so that they are ALL accessible and playable by low-skill players while also providing challenge to competitive players who want to push the limits of their class/job? How do we achieve this while also avoiding limiting player choice by making one tank class/job more effective than another tank class/job? The ideal situation, in other words, is to have all the 3 tank classes at equal difficulty and equal damage (personal dps or raidwide dps contribution) but to have the difficulty of these classes land in the perfect "goldilocks" zone which satisfies the level of play of both casual and competitive players.

I can think of a multi-step process that may alleviate some of these problems:
Step 1: Increase the difficulty and damage output of PLD. (Not its personal damage, but allow it to increase raidwide DPS via support buffs or support mechanics). At this point, PLD, WAR, and DRK will all be above the skill level of most casual players. They will effectively be isolated/"locked out" of these classes because they're simply too hard for them to play. Step 2 will address this issue.
Step 2: Make rotations of all classes/jobs more straightforward. No more trying to figure out if saving Infuriate and Internal Release for your Berserk window is a DPS loss or gain (hold it, obviously xD). If Infuriate and IR had the same CD as Berserk, than it would be much more straightforward. Basically, if you can create a simple flowchart of the rotation of a job/class without having to write down a bunch of crap in asterisks then that's a good start.
Step 3: Create level 60 tutorials for each job detailing the proper rotations. (If SE has the resources, then this would further cater to the low-skill players while having no detrimental effects to the competitive scene).
Step 4: Make ridiculously hard fights that require the competitive players to rearrange their rotations in order to optimize damage output in the fight.

SE's plans for 4.0 rotations actually reflects this. I hear they're going to make rotations easier and more straightforward. Moreover, I hear that the next raid will have a difficulty level that's twice as difficult as the savage tier right now! I'm a competitive player, and even if they do make rotations easier, I'll be happy so long as I can still push my job to its maximum potential in such a difficult fight.