Can we talk about how mnk, drg, and blm are blatantly overpowered right now?

[Myon88]

there's not nearly the same anti-melee fetish other games have

There is an interesting point there I'm been mulling over too, to try and explain the state of most of the melees and blm relative to the rest of the jobs. They're distinguished by their damage output being very binary in nature. While ranged are well, ranged, and jobs like summoner can lean on tools like ruin2. For them, if you're not in range or not casting, you're simply not doing any meaningful damage on these jobs.

So it raises the question of what level of play these jobs' expected damage output is balanced around, from SE's point of view. If they assume perfect uptime as the baseline, then harsh fight design or poor play will punish you severely. Conversely, if they're more conservative and balance around the assumption that these jobs only see, for example, 85% uptime on average, then in the instance you're able to achieve more efficiency than that you'll see results above the intended spec. Looking at the level of fights we have now, they're certainly practically full uptime endeavours for experienced melees and black mages. A combination of many successive additions of tools meant to help them deal with downtime, general player skill, and not to mention the ability for groups to alter strategies to cater to these jobs' restrictions.

Insofar as this premise is true however, the ranged don't really have that privilege. Their damage output is I assume viewed as something relatively stable throughout a fight. If it's assumed ranged are always attacking by default, there's is no way for them to overcome that baseline expectation through better play or something. Correspondingly, if their intended dps is then pegged against a melee/blm only achieving 85% uptime, then you have your 'ranged tax', baked directly into the job itself. Likewise for summoners, they too have a 'ranged tax' in the form of ruin2's 40 potency opportunity cost over ruin3. Lacking the movement tools of other jobs, they have no choice but to lean on ruin2 in actual fights and buy into their version of the tax.

It's not a very encouraging thought though. It means that melees and blms are basically the only jobs that reward you for reaching the actual skill ceiling of the job. As ranged on the other hand, you're basically artificially capped at the level of someone playing a corresponding melee or casting job only 85% efficiently. Personally I don't think it's very healthy for the roles to be designed that way, you might as well slap 'big boy' and 'newbie' stickers on those respective jobs in that case, just to rub it in, so I hope these speculations are completely wrong.