Red Mage in 5.0 in Review: Feelings after Reaching 80

[Archwizard]

I agree with almost everything here, except for one major aspect:

Moving Engagement to level 40 to become "a core part of Red Mage decision making" will not address any of Engagement's intrinsic issues. While I agree that it came perhaps too late in our leveling curve (I've used it maybe twice throughout leveling, and only when I was about to hit Manafication and wanted to save the dash from Corps-a-corps for a mechanic I knew was coming), it has at least two larger issues:

• The fact that it serves to promote Displacement as a damage gain means that our damage can be arbitrarily penalized by encounter design. Yes, this is more of an issue with Displacement and yes, Engagement is made to mitigate that loss, but the point is that that is a circumstance beyond our control that directly impacts us and Engagement serves as a band-aid at best and official endorsement of this design flaw at worst.
• The fact that it's a damage loss compared to Displacement means that even in scenarios it's made for, we will see players attempt to cheese any way they can to avoid using Engagement, meaning Engagement itself contributes to bloat. I've had a friend raving to me about how his static's RDM Displaced off the edge of Titania EX, and while his intent is to give a funny story about an awesome WHM Rescuing him in time, what I keep hearing is that's a situation it was made for and players would still rather ignore it for however paltry a damage gain.

Meanwhile, I've seen it pointed out that the devs could have just put Corps-a-corps and Displacement on shared charges so Corps-a-corps could perform the same task as Engagement, so even for the sake of giving us a "choice", you really can't tell me that contributing to bloat was the only way to do so.
Bear in mind, even with the risk factor of using Displacement over Engagement, we're still going to be middle of the pack at best if we used Displacement every time, meaning we don't receive nearly enough reward for the looming threat of death. It's an incredibly flawed "choice" with multiple other avenues to address Displacement directly.

Personally, I would rather have seen Corps-a-corps and Displacement lose their damage and just become pure movement tools (perhaps adding an Enmity reduction to Displacement like Elusive Jump, or some type of CC to each so the cross-slash animation would still have meaning), and never have seen Engagement.
And even if the devs have clearly decided that Corps-a-corps and Displacement are intended as essential parts of the rotation and the damage is non-negotiable, there are options there too; I've previously proposed tying the two skills into one button, so that your position is temporarily logged when you hit Corps-a-corps and then it turns into Displacement to send you back to that starting point, which is a far safer alternative to the current circumstance (at the very least meaning you won't Displace off a ledge).

TL;DR: Replace Engagement and just fix Displacement.