Dear SE, I am a Healer

[Vaer]

I believe Yoshi-P actually stated a while back that the original plan was to introduce SAM in 3.0, but they felt they should hold off after just adding NIN, as too many eastern themed jobs at once might feel like too much.

So there's your answer why SAM was added in 4.0. It did also fit 4.0s theme, which probably helped.

They actually thought of adding melee #4 and two melee dps in a row about a year apart with ranged at 1 job? Of course they didn't, but this is why I'm skeptical of the subrole excuse. What I'm getting is that they're trying to balance the subroles until they aren't.

Maybe that is what the dev team thinks, that DPS needs to get 3 jobs (1 for each subrole) before tanks and healers can get 1. With 2 every 2 years that's awful. 2 years is already an eternity in the MMO genre.