>I don't see SMN doing identical personal damage to SAM or BLM even after it's soon to be buffs, I just can't wrap my head around that.

Doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Look up some statistics, it's absolutely true. This isn't a "my personal opinion" thing.

>but I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding SAM/BLM.

Yeah, there is. They're simply not doing enough raid dps, and all they bring to the party is personal damage in the first place. I don't care what you're seeing in groups where people don't know how to press buttons, that's completely irrelevant. There is only a very small difference in personal damage between MCH/BRD, and BLM, and almost no difference between BLM and SMN right now. And that's really screwed up, since when you add in the contribution of their party buffs, BLM falls far behind. The design of BLM and SAM makes sense when their personal damage outweighs the fact that they have no raid buffs. Right now it absolutely does not, that's why this thread happened in the first place, because this problem is directly opposed to the design of the job. BLM is pretty much the least useful DPS in the game right now, you don't find anything wrong with that?

>instead of players just improving their personal performance and not worrying about what they "could" be doing

There are BLM that have full uptime or as close as possible to it on these fights already, we're not talking about situations where there is room to improve. We're talking about what the job is capable of doing at its full potential.