Since you dropped the "creativity" card
Why are you dropping Mighty Guard when you're going to use 1000 needles? The fact that Mighty Guard is up does not affect 1000 needles at all. Neither does bristle, by the way so there's no point in casting it before using 1000 needles. You can cast all that with mighty guard up and not even need to heal. I mean, sure you can be blissfully ignorant that you're spending a lot more time casting spells you really don't need to in order to kill a mob, all power to you. But don't attack someone's creativity because they are not traipsing around and picking daisies and having fun with that like you are. Now I will offer some apologies for my tone, but I really hate people who are blissfully ignorant and "having fun" retorting against people who are at least trying to get some criticism across.
The points the OP makes are completely valid. Blue is terribly designed and the idea of a "limited class" is just stupid with the product we have been given. Seriously, did SE do any planning? This is meant to be a "solo" job. That's why we CANNOT ENTER DF. Yet, our level 20 job quest requires learning a spell from a dungeon and it's not a guaranteed learn. Meaning we either have to: overlevel the dungeon and run it solo ourselves over and over again with no XP or anything or bug people to join us in party finder over and over again until we learn the spell because the only mob you can learn the spell from is the last boss and you have to run the entire dungeon again if you happen not to learn the ability from him. Why should we have to use Party Finder for this!? If you're going to make us learn abilities in dungeons and require them for our job quests, then for crying out loud [B]balance the job enough to let us use the god-damned duty finder./B] Hell, you cannot even enter a dungeon with your grand company squadrons as BLU. Let alone Deepcroft being one of the dungeons allowed. (At least it's not in my list, I checked.)
To further accentuate the poor design choice of the spells and "progression" out of 49 spells almost HALF of them are only learned from a level 49/50 dungeon. And 2 of them are comically impractical to use because they actually kill you for using them. They had the basis of a fine design for BLU and a BLU mage system in the FFXI blue mage. All they had to do was incorporate it into their design for FFXIV and they could have had something far better than what we had here and if they had spent just a little bit of time and energy, they might have even been able to balance it to be a fully realized job. Perhaps even using a point system towards a role where as if you had enough spells to meet a certain role's requirements, you could queue as that role in DF. But they were too lazy, and nowhere nearly innovative enough to do so and hence we got this barebones collect-a-spell minigame in the form of a "job" that no one really wanted (the minigame, not the job). And to clarify that last statement, most people who wanted BLU expected to have to travel around and learn spells. I'm sure most of us even wanted that (I did) but the fact that once you learn the handful of them that you can learn up till about 30 or so, you have to grind to 50 to get most of the rest which is stupid.
Can I also just point out that the BLU job quests are absolutely stupid as well? I have to learn Mind Blast to kill 2 moles? Seriously? And for XP and some gil... even into the 30s. No new abilities or even a freaking weapon upgrade. I know INT is supposed to be the main factor for abilities, but hell can't we get an upgrade to the level 1 weapon sometime down the quest line not at 50? Assuming we even get one then?