People who are mad about the "limited job" didn't actually want Blue Mage.

[Freyt]

You could even make it so that the abilities you take when you enter matchmaking are set, but abilities you take when you pre-form can be adjusted. This way no one can complain if they end up with a blue mage in duty finder.

[Fredco191]

I didn’t exactly want Blue Mage to begin with. But I thought if they added it, it would have been a normal job.

[Fawkes]

I am not ignoring anything, but if you are willing to provide a source to you're first "quote" from Yoshi-P and the corresponding response I would welcome considering it. I have a difficult time remembering everything Yoshida has said for years ago and the community response is notoriously inconsistent.

Here is a thread that talks about Yoshida's statement about Blue Mage from four years ago. I don't think the consensus was "Yeah, makes sense" though.

[Malzian]

Q: I love the blue mage job that appears in the FINAL FANTASY series. Will the blue mage job ever be implemented in FFXIV?

A: I think that blue mage is an interesting job because you can learn spells from enemies, but honestly I don't think that it really fits MMORPG party settings. If anything, I think it would work solo and it would be really fun to implement it as a job where you go around and learn abilities from every monster, so I'd definitely like to try and do this, but I'm concerned when it comes to playing in a party players would put up barriers if you haven't learned certain abilities. Additionally, in the event you are able to use abilities forever once you learn them, the difficulty of learning abilities would be high, and we wouldn't be able to balance the system so it wouldn't revolve around procuring your abilities instead of equipment. This wouldn't be practical enough to fit in an MMORPG party setting and conversely if you are swapping in only certain abilities you've learned, the true image of a blue mage would diminish, so this is something that I am concerned with. Letter LIVE XVII; 08/23/2014

Thank you for providing the source.

Here is a thread that talks about Yoshida's statement about Blue Mage from four years ago. I don't think the consensus was "Yeah, makes sense" though.

Yes, I agree with that, I don't feel that everyone through it "made sense". One also needs to remember that the community has changed significantly in the last 4 years and the community opinion has always been fickle.

[BubblyBoar]

What's with this idea that BLU is about having overpowered and broken skills. It's about using monster skills and casting them as blue magic. Not all of them are broken and unbalanced and the class can play like a normal one in its history. Just because a few games had fun and gimmicky stuff doesn't mean that was ALL the class was built for. What is this nonsense even?

[Kikoten]

I'd imagine that Blue Mages have a bit of a strong arm to swing their... scepters? around with. Who's to say that the FFXIV iteration of BLU doesn't have signature moves to perform with their scepters? I remember seeing pictures of BLU in FF11 wielding swords and the like.

[Berteaux_Braumegain]

I'm not mad at Square for making Blue Mage unique. I'm upset that its uniqueness comes at the cost of my being unable to use it in the content I like doing until it's outdated and I have a premade party.

[Shurrikhan]

SE is coming up with a really neat idea here. They're creating a class that's completely original to level, completely original to gain skills, completely broken for normal game content, and you're all getting mad for it. The way this game is made, you could not keep BLU true to it's form. This is the only way BLU can be handled in this game and it's a fantastic way of handling it.

Okay, but what did they do it instead of?

We could have moved towards further job identity for all jobs, making each as fun to play in the open world as BLU will be. We could have shifted job treatment and fight complexity as to allow for a real BLU to also participate in real content.

Instead, we got placation, in the form of a job-minigame.

It's not BLU being BLU that comes as a slap to the face for many of us. It's that it's their way of saying that they will never allow substantial job identity to be anything but a minigame.

[TaleraRistain]

I wasn't interested in blue mage but I'm interested now. I had fears they would need to water it down to just getting abilities during job quests. One of the best part of blue mages in FF games for me is scouring the world to collect abilities. There was also concern about how blue mages straddle roles. That seems like it would be tricky to try to balance. So I'm really looking forward to trying this out. I don't need to be able to take it into group content.

[DamianFatale]

Wrong. Try again.

This. I did want Blue Mage, and I’ve played the whole mainline series. I like the system of learning any monster attack you want, but feel like Blue should still have been adapted as a normal job, and not a limited one. To say that we didn’t want it, when OP doesn’t know us really is ignorant.