After years of playing Summoner, I'm shelving the job and here's why.

[LastDream]

The only way they fix SMN now is separate it from SCH, leave the SCH with the medical/viruses dps and healing skills and make SMN an actual SMN with either more pet interaction or fast-paced summoning on each skill (that just works visually, like summon Garuda for a GCD and off she goes real quick) and of course balance it as a caster job without looking at SCH anymore.

[Trespar]

The only way they fix SMN now is separate it from SCH, leave the SCH with the medical/viruses dps and healing skills and make SMN an actual SMN with either more pet interaction or fast-paced summoning on each skill (that just works visually, like summon Garuda for a GCD and off she goes real quick) and of course balance it as a caster job without looking at SCH anymore.

I've felt this way since 2.0.

SMN just isn't a summoner, and it blows.

But you can't just eliminate the DoT dps archetype, either. I'd like to see that preserved as simply a job called ACN.
I'd make that more virus/poison focused, and renaming the DoTs for SCH to be more.. positively charged, I guess? Like changing Bio(which would be an ACN skill) into Dia(which was a holy type DoT in FFXI). Doesn't necessarily have to be Dia, because that is a traditional white magic spell, I'm just using it as an example.

I do like the idea of the poison using medic, but I ultimately feel like that is more something for a hypothetical chemist job, than scholar.

SCH would be torn from ACN, to eliminate balance issues and essentially have most of their kit renamed and rebalanced to make sense but still be basically the same.. ish.

And then SMN relaunched as a real pet job, that isn't just Bahamut, but not really.

Unfortunately, none of that will ever happen and I just wasted my time.
But the idea of a real summoner-style job is really appealing to me, so I can't help but throw in my two cents.