Why I look forward to Limited jobs

[Verlyn]

You know what I want from Blue Mage? Gear.

Or more specifically, stats. Ever since beta I've heard "We can't have interesting stats on gear because it's hard to balance", well now we have Limited Jobs...

It's because limited jobs were never intended to be a solution. They were intended to be a shortcut out of the concept's design challenges.
BLU has an extremely basic functional gameplay (they barely tried to put a rotation together, really), in exchange for a bunch of bells and whistles like Masked Carnivale. I would be surprised and frustrated if they developed unique and interesting gear passives and then told the rest of the game "nope, you can't have that. Enjoy your basic secondary stats. Want some more crit and spell speed that barely makes a difference?"

[Duelle]

It's because limited jobs were never intended to be a solution. They were intended to be a shortcut out of the concept's design challenges.

In the context of BLU, what gets me is that its design challenges aren't really challenges. Spell learning could have used the hunting log interface (which is what the Blue Magic spellbook is). Concerns about players queuing up for dungeons without crucial spells could have used the lock out mechanisms that exist for dungeons and raids (i-level, story completion). As for mechanics, have spells play off monster affinity (the mob the spell was learned from) or tier Blue Magic between lesser spells that come from common beasts and greater spells that come from powerful monsters/iconic Final Fantasy creatures. Use spells that make sense for balanced gameplay and exclude OP things like Doom and Lv5 Petrify (really, there's nothing written saying that BLU isn't BLU unless they have things like Doom in their spellbook).

It's almost like the devs looked at how BLU acquires its skills and instantly said "yeah this can't be done".