Blue Mage might actually be a good thing.

[Shadowshinra]

But that is what Blue Mage never was in any of FF past titles, Blue is that job that do (may i say almost?) all things at the same time.

It heals great amounts of HP with white wind, it protects everyone with Migthy Guard (and ohgod that thing is OP!) and buff/debuffs/attack with very niche (and Powerful) spells.

You see, Blue do all those things in just one battle. Losing the capacity to do this is saying goobye to a Blue Mage experience and Yoshida said he wanted the players to feel this in FFXIV.

You can say the same things about SMN and RDM, both in older games are very similar to BLU in regards to what they can do, a SMN could heal with a summon, tank with a summon, buff with a summon etc, RDM could replace both a BLM and WHM since it does both. And yet when they were put into the game they were given set rotations. Were people mad about some of the design choices of them? Sure! But they're still fully playable jobs that can used in ALL content.