Dancer Flourish is badly designed and not actually enjoyable to use

[Raqrie_Tohka]

Please explain how you think the spirit of the job is being infringed upon?

Dancer was designed after SE settled on their class design philosophy for this expansion and the foreseeable future, aka. vastly "streamlining" classes.
But before, they tried very hard in various ways to give jobs more spirit and silhouette. Dancer was infringed upon before we even first saw it.
It was only possible to ever see light in a variously "neutered" position.

...Your main point of contention here is Flourish optimization...
If you’re arguing that DNC’s gameplay as a whole is now flawed (“off, weak, neutered”), you’ve shifted the goalposts of your original argument.

No, my main point is that 'Flourish' is of bad design, and iconical of why the job feels badly designed, for me. Optimization aka. the experience of actually playing it was but one factor.
So I did not shift the goalpost of my argument. Perhaps I changed the scope of it. But my posted arguments are rarely about individual concerns (e.g. specific mechanics) alone to begin with, if they are, you'd usually be able to clearly and quickly read to the point.
The feather normalization is a point but I'll not focus on for now:
My main point is that as a "true" image of the class, this version would probably rank rather low on all possible versions in many variables, including but not limited to, how much a player can identify with, be inspired by, see this class as an aesthetic in logic, to be beautiful, instead of purely instrumental and balanced aka. neutered. To put it in another way, bard this expansion would rank among one of its lower points because of the lack of iconic support functions in its songs. I'm saying the same for dancer, but at even deeper levels. Instead of weak and unrepresentative songs, it's whole "song system" is weak.

It does become “un-dull” with Flourish. The skill gives you more buttons to press; pressing 1-2 and just waiting for a proc is very dull, so it’s nice for Flourish to actually give them to you automatically. And moving into melee range to land your two AOE Flourished skills is also something I personally find engaging, as it requires me to move my character instead of just turret-ing at range. I encourage you to spend weeks playing DNC in a Savage, or other optimized, level-cap setting; and then venture into UCoB or UwU and sync down to level 70. You will notice a very obvious “dullness” to the way it plays immediately—the opener is particularly painful, because you do your standard SF on pull > Technical set-up > and then no Flourish so you gotta do the good ol’ 1-2. Not even a Saber Dance to break up that great fun...

I still don’t know why you’re complaining about it “sticking out like a sore thumb”—it’s a basic skill that you use on cooldown every 60 seconds to guarantee 5 procs. Before utilization, you manage any existing procs you may have so as to not overwrite them—this is just a simple “pay attention to your procs” mechanic, much like you have to do with BRD in Minuet and Mage’s Ballad (especially the latter with Empyreal Arrow and Bloodletter), or even with RDM (since you don’t want to overwrite any Verstone or Verfire procs). If you have to delay Flourish by 1 GCD, it’s not the end of the world, and it will still continue to line up with future buff windows. The only time it will not is if you have screwed up your own buff windows, either by delaying Flourish or Technical Finish too long. Practice helps reduce the change of that occurring.

Flourish sticks out like a sore thumb TO YOU. Be sure to clarify that, because you’re making it sound as if that’s the case for a lot of other players, and I don’t see any evidence of that being the case. Your entire argument about how the job is beginner friendly/should be beginner friendly is bordering on synonymous with “please dumb this job down even more”—DNC is not hard to play; and if you’re having difficulties with it, practice your rotation is really all I can suggest to you.

I’m sorry, but I cannot agree with such a sentiment. I’d rather not another job lose an added layer of something simply because you seem to be having issues with a particular skill.

I could make Ninja more un-dull by introducing more chaos to its mudras. Give it a mudra-version of flourish too why not which oh wait, it already does! Two in fact, TCJ and Kassatsu. See how uninspired this kind of design is. It's a neutered down version for individual procs instead of procced combos. Much easier for newcomers to input.
But does Ninja feel extremely dull at level 70? No. Unlike dancer. This should be saying something to the core design quality of dancer's rotation, which it is overwhelmingly represented by under level 70 before it gets the end-game skills. Oh wait, what core rotation? Dancer never raided at level 70! It was only designed this expansion and to be ensured, to perform well in dungeons where it could utilize its pure AOE combo, and make newcomers feel they are playing a powerful class!
Flourish may be the sparkly, fun mechanic that it, mechanically wise, is. For a lot of players. But design-wise, I will shamelessly view it as some desperate design measure to make dancer have some guise of a powerful skillset at level 80, when in reality it's just a "here's a free proc train for your burst phase so you look like you are bursting a lot" smokescreen mechanic. It fixes nothing. It adds little qualitative-wise. I am sick and tired of these little number games SE plays as a form of class design, 150% mudra increase here, 5% dps increase there, use this within your burst window here, etc. It adds little to the actual spirit, flow, iconic playstyle of the class besides giving you more buttons to mash and quash bigger numbers on virtually same things.

Flourish sticks out like a sore thumb TO YOU. Be sure to clarify that, because you’re making it sound as if that’s the case for a lot of other players, and I don’t see any evidence of that being the case. Your entire argument about how the job is beginner friendly/should be beginner friendly is bordering on synonymous with “please dumb this job down even more”—DNC is not hard to play; and if you’re having difficulties with it, practice your rotation is really all I can suggest to you.

I’m sorry, but I cannot agree with such a sentiment. I’d rather not another job lose an added layer of something simply because you seem to be having issues with a particular skill.

It seems odd to me that you’re asking for Flourish to have more depth when your opening post was complaining about how hard it was to utilize/optimize.

So everything here is a reply based on you not understanding my main sentiment. Which I doubt I was able to completely express even here. My entire argument is not, dumb this mechanic down because it's complex/ I don't like it. It's "this mechanic is representative as a tip of the iceberg on a design philosophy which leads to compromises in the quality of final class designs". I have not explicitly express any specific ways or even theoretical ways to improve it as of yet, while you are putting words in my mouth in how I want to dumb it down then 'contradict myself', which makes no sense, because I have not and would not say such a thing. Of course it seems odd.

Ideally I would not pile on random layers of "something" either. There needs to be, has to exist, better ways to express a class than the examples of design I gave here just now. I don't know how much of a change of the combat system will it involve. It's complicated. This makes my position vulnerable when talking about topics of such complexity, and I appreciate players to not take advantage of that simply for the sake of winning an argument.

And finally, I know how this sounds, but normal players really would not see the difference or see things from this perspective at all. Most people are perfectly happy and content with nice stuff and it's not a bad thing. Many people can be pleased by a lot less. I don't want to say depressing things about what makes good money is good but if you are striving for artistic perfection and whatnot, you will really judge many things differently.