Heya, I've been a main Monk since Arr, and an experienced raider with this job since Arr as well (although I play all melees, I mostly prog as monk or samurai).
I agree with you mostly, Monk has very good numbers today, but since stormblood the job is a complete mess riddled with useless skills or skills that are so niche, they actually reduce our DPS.
- Tornado kick : very useless skill although it was good at the end of stormblood (this was probably the best rotation Monk ever had, while it lasted). As for now, it is even less useful because of Six Sided Star and the ability to keep GL forever. Be happy to even use it properly once during a fight. Also I see many beginners using it all the time, which is very bad. Its design itself is counter intuitive as Monks are encouraged to keep their staks and have many things to keep them up. The skill needs a complete redesign.
- Six sided star : kind of the new tornado kick in terms of usage, very underwhelming, DPS loss if used at the wrong time and the worst part is that it is still tied to GCD.
- Riddle of earth : formerly used to maintain stacks, it had a few use cases in Storblood. Now it is just an OP True North. This skill is competely overpowered as we speak now.
- Riddle of wind : was good at the end of stormblood as it allowed the tornado kick rotation (although it was really garbage at the start, like the most useless thing ever). Now it's just gone.
- One ilm punch : although it was removed in Shadowbringers, this skill was trash from the beginning and could just be removed from the hotbar. It took the devs 6 years to remove it and replace it with a proper AOE move.
- Riddle of fire : it was awful in Stormblood, being slowed down was horrible however I see why the devs did this so we could double weave. But still the feeling was bad.
- Brotherhood : random chackra proc, this is awful too. Monks was a steady job that needed skill only to perform good. Rng was not needed and it needs to be removed.
- Touch of death : RIP ... It actually was a nice skill for monk, that would allow us some control over the flow of our rotation, same for fracture. But you know, lower the skill ceiling ...
- Anatman : almost useless since we can keep stacks forever. The only use case is if we have enough downtime to TK and anatman after, which almost never happens again. Worst part of it : it is tied to server tick and we need it for the optimal opener. This makes me want to quit monk until fixed. I sincerly hope this is an oversight because if I imagine that someone approved this I can't help but facepalming.
And also they removed two offgcds, making the main rotation even more boring.
All of this leaves barely any doubt : no one in the Dev team knows the job and how to play it. They've let monks down since the first expansion.
We've got so far : almost no change in HW and were buffed many times then SB broke the job then fixed it and now broken again in ShB although the dps is great (actually competely OP).
I strongly believe that Monk, like Mch needs a complete rework from ground up. No amount of fixes would be anough at this point without taking the time to really think about the job itself.