Why are summoners so neglected?

[Khaidal]

Personally when I think of a pet job I think of beast mastery hunters and unholy death knights where your rotation empowered the pet.

You'll have to forgive me, I have no idea what those are. (limited mmo experience ha ha.)

Weren't those jobs, also Puppeteer I think, absolute garbage bottom tier for years?

They had their nuances, and many used them for soloing. SMNs was sometimes brought along for buffs and hate free damage for endgame, but that's about it. BST and PUP on the other hand didn't have a whole lot of endgame value. Still love my old PUP, even if I couldn't bring it to Kirin.

[Ririta]

You'll have to forgive me, I have no idea what those are. (limited mmo experience ha ha.)

Ah, I'm just saying what I personally expected from summoners as a pet job. Imagine if Fester was a command to order the pet to do a strong single target attack or if Dreadwyrm Trance empowered the pet instead of yourself. That's how pet classes worked in WoW, together with unique debuffs/buffs for each pet (in the case of hunters).

Speaking of WoW... one thing it did right was giving pets a way to travel faster. Ifrit really needs a charge attack so he can quickly get into targets and remove that advantage from Garuda.

Red mages use swords. They were the second-best melee weapon class in FF1 until the job change, since they could use silver/mythril swords, and they are actually good tanks for the first few quests because they can use chain armor. In FF3, red mages basically exist to use the wightslayer early on, which is another sword. In FF5, Dual Cast was something you got as a reward for leveling an obsolete class. It basically existed because Red Mages, as was the case in FF1 and FF3, sucked after you progressed very far in the game. For the brief period they were good, they had decent weapons as well as decent spells.

So yeah, red mages were always melee hybrid casters. This is even true in FFXI: they got the original en-spells. The only reason they didn't melee in FFXI was because feeding TP to mobs outweighed their contribution. They were clearly designed to melee (their artifact weapon is a sword!), but then, ninjas were designed to DPS, too. The FFXI team didn't have a huge success rate at jobs being played as intended.

Guess I should've explored the job more, using them as attackers always seemed inferior to just equipping staffs and sticking with magic especially on FFIII due to it being a pretty punishing game.

So my idea of the job kinda became "uses white and black magic".

[Duelle]

Ah, I'm just saying what I personally expected from summoners as a pet job. Imagine if Fester was a command to order the pet to do a strong single target attack or if Dreadwyrm Trance empowered the pet instead of yourself. That's how pet classes worked in WoW, together with unique debuffs/buffs for each pet (in the case of hunters).

Speaking of WoW... one thing it did right was giving pets a way to travel faster. Ifrit really needs a charge attack so he can quickly get into targets and remove that advantage from Garuda.

Well, there's also The Beast Within and the Unholy DK variant.

Guess I should've explored the job more, using them as attackers always seemed inferior to just equipping staffs and sticking with magic especially on FFIII due to it being a pretty punishing game.

So my idea of the job kinda became "uses white and black magic".

It was a matter of scaling and the fact that you got jobs that were more powerful as the game progressed. That's just a side effect of having a job system in-game. It'd be another story if you had characters with set classes like FFIV and (arguably) FFVI. In those cases you'd be able to get away with RDM playing up to both its sides (well, within the severe limitations turn-based combat places on hybrid classes).