Why are summoners so neglected?

[Duelle]

SMN makes a pretty bad pet job conceptually anyway. I agree with what you are saying, however I think that that would result in two different jobs. My absolute ideal scenario is designing SMN around the trance element, at the same time as introducing BST as the pet focused job that everyone wants SMN to be. SMN right now is caught between a rock and a hard place because people want it to feel like a SMN and be pet focused, and that is not feasible (no matter what FFXI has people believe).

I disagree here. You don't have to turn the job into the Lineage II Arcana Lord (a caster that summons pets, whose entire skill set is basically pet-specific buffs and heals to cast) to give the job the needed focus on pets.

There's a reason I've mentioned things both on the obvious and subtle levels. The player knowing that their pet gains extra damage on mobs affected by their DoTs is one way to establish a connection between the master and pet without having to go the route of Arcana Lord skills. On the obvious side of things, giving the job cooldowns that affect pets would be a step in the right direction (hence why I mentioned an aetherflow skill that makes your egi temporarily "evolve" into something a little closer to the primal the egi is based on while dealing more damage). Having a context-sensitive button for egi utility would also establish the master-pet connection by making the player feel they're directly commanding the egi to do things while still being part of a rotation if implemented properly. Simply put, there's ways to make it work.

My issue with Dreadwyrm Trance is that while it looks cool, it's also VERY limiting in concept. It's really something that's clearly built without much room for growth, because the most you would add to it between the 60 and 70 level caps would be more powerful skills to take the place of Ruin 3 and Pain Flare once trance is up. Sure, we can go back to my earlier point about how Bahamut is the end all of summons, but that makes the idea of summoner sort of pointless if you have only one entity that actually counts (you might as well name the job "Dragon Caller" if you're going that route).

I've always imagined BST as a dual axe or spear-wielder just because whips have always seemed a bit too distant and disengaged from the heat of the fight to pull off that sort of synergy.

Melee would get really crowded if you went that direction. At least Survival hunters are stationary, so even though they take extra space because of their pet, you don't have anyone shuffling from rear to flanks like we do here.

Similarly, I've always imagined most of the core Aetherflow abilities as being pet-dependent or pet-differentiated, AF being spendable on burst casts or pet buffs, and Aetherflow generating particular, synergizing elements via Aethertrail based on the pet used to contribute to its Trace (e.g. Fire, Wind, Unaspected -> Phoenix Trance; any two non-synergizing pairs of opposite elements create Dreadwyrm Trance; more AF stacks overall).

This would definitely necessitate splitting SCH and SMN completely, which I'm not opposed to.

We may yet see SAM thrown out as a "critical conceptual error" just for having ani-locked movement, and that wouldn't quite be the whole truth either; there would have yet been ways to balance that ani-lock, showing that the true issue was the lack of eventive movement manipulation, not the ani-lock itself.

You'd have to design content to require less movement or give SAM passive damage reduction/evasion when using animation-locked skills. And that has a ton of room for abuse. This wouldn't be like WoW Demon Hunters that have just an increased dodge chance on some of the more animated skills (and really, they have that because certain skill animations put them in front of the mob, where they'd get their faces crit off followed by a dirt nap).