You write that as if things haven't been paid attention to with projected gains for all the other jobs, or lack thereof where applicable. I'd like to mention to you, that The Balance is a group effort where all of the mentors are in contact with one another. We have several people dedicated to each job and each worked hard on projecting overall increases, many of which were made into Kupobot commands for the community to request if they were curious, whether it was DNC or BRD having a ballpark increase of @ ~3.5%, MCH at ~4-6%, RDM increasing at ~800 RDPS at BiS minimum with party and synergy buffs accounted for, the penalties of MNK no longer being able to do the Anatman opener (beyond Aya trying to break it with slidecast face pull methods), etc.

All of the job rotation models aren't hidden beyond the personal ones as people try out their own ideas and make sure they are sane enough before sharing them further. All jobs have been combing through their data, comparing and correcting models before with the preliminary notes, and afterwards once having the changes in hand and being able to ascertain. Hell, with Summoner those of us who work on the TC have been doing so with hours of testing against the dummies just to have pet AI play nice, which is leading us to discover certain opening timings working better than others, a group collaboration effort for all regions thanks to our decision to bring on the likes of Miyabi and Everiorio from Japan.

The OP could have listed all of what was discussed, at least on that I'll concede, I can update it further with the information I've kept in mind and perhaps taken for granted, however, let me emphasise why it was important to bring up early after immediately observing caster scaled melee pet damage.

Summoner was projected to have some of the largest % gains among all jobs receiving adjustments, before accounting for synergy and the party % buffs. When we discussed it, the floor increase was + ~6% overall assuming the worst-case pet scaling where nothing changed and melee pets remained as is. This was already eclipsing the projected gains of jobs with similar total raid DPS contributions - that is RDM and Ranged wherein our slice of job balance relative to one another we were actually pretty damn well balanced, it was the top end that was out of place. Now consider that the upper end of this projection was >= 10% for the caster scaling case before further accounting for party% buff (which, at least, pets do not benefit from) and raid synergy which Summoner benefits from tremendously, even more so from all the rotational and potency changes. This is the current reality. Now consider what would have been if they had been bumped up to literal player potency, Summoner would be the highest performing job in the game without a shadow of doubt and was why I was certain player pet scaling was not the end case, but that they would opt for standardised ACN/SMN pet potency across the board.

Ranges have to be used for SMN projections because it is by far the most awkward job to model accurately for damage because of pets. Everything else about the job's rotation is simple to account for. Pet AI and pet calculations when the end scaling isn't yet confirmed (but at least now has been), not so much.

I would mention another part of my work which deals precisely with all historically uploaded data and what prompted Kihra to start with more statistical metrics on his own website, however, you're under the belief that it's just a clamour for attention and traffic (when I haven't even uploaded the podcast yet as it was several hours, nor linked to specific sites beyond what's in my signature for SMN and general game TC for all to make use of). The historical data is there both on his website and mine, just as job use metrics also are and how that trends over each day thanks to the data crunching through the API.

Players are already starting to see how close SMN is to BLM now with more typical factors. How much higher it is to other jobs that were increased, like Hinoka, one of the game's current leading RDMs, mentioning his co caster SMN player and friend of mine Kefka's Laugh, had more total damage dealt in Eden savage even with accounting for Kefka's 1 death and 25% weakness. It takes such a sheer base lead for that to happen even with strong outlier RNG. Although one other potential bug relating to that is people noticing that their gauge states are persisting through death, which was not mentioned in the patch notes and not how SMN gauges have worked since 4.0 release.

Last time before the expansion was released, people would make comments about our lack of data, that we need to wait and see how things would be. Things became just how we projected in terms of how the job would play, and even worse in terms of damage projections because not in any timeline did we anticipate Ifrit no longer doing "attack" autos.

Now it's the same story, where people insist on waiting to see how things shake out because how could we possibly be able to use previous trends and accurate models for jobs to be able to forecast where things will end up. These things have been worked on for years, just as TheoryJerks/Allagan Studies had solved and since updated/refined the damage formulae for all jobs so that we could have these accurate job sims in the first place. This commentary about SMN being too strong is coming from several of us among the Theorycrafting scene, not only myself.

If the rest of us and I in the know are wrong, then we can eat our words. Are you prepared to do the same?