I made this video reviewing the state of 5.0 SMN discussing at length how things changed from Stormblood to Shadowbringers. Things covered included the anti-synergies and how the job took further steps backwards in downtime management. You managed to miss some of the worst parts notably how inflexible the job was and the disaster that was Festerruins.

Later I then made a video talking about how SE originally intended for 5.0 SMN to play as per their official Japanese job guide book (which I now have with HQ scans on akhmorning.com). It featured a bunch of things that simply didn't work in practice like their Demi-summon rotations or impossible Festers.

5.0 release was pretty much a train wreck and it took much feedback and a lot of forum threads for SE to realise how much they messed up discussing the urgency of needed changes and giving SMN players a sincere public apology during a PLL and being one of only two jobs to have a drastic early patch rework due to how bad they were. (The other being NIN). You can see in the play statistics for the first raid tier how little the job was played until 5.1.

FBT was really the only good new thing they gave us and even then it made no sense in two ways of which one was fixed (Everlasting Flight's HoT duration increased from 20s to 21s to always be 7 ticks instead of 6 or 7 ticks) and the other being Phoenix's inability to react to the first Fountain of Fire for Scarlet Flame due to their coding and EF's animation lock (which is still present to this day and requires one of several methods to navigate around).

However, Egi Assaults being on the GCD instead of OGCDs was a big boost in mobility and reducing double weave cpm bloat. Tri-disaster having 300p on hit effectively being M3 B3 Fester is very strong now, even post DoT nerfs in 5.2. Trances now have a cd of 55s which opener up some powerful choices for executing encounters with the ideas of the standard 2 min cycle timings or rushing trances on cooldown each with their own strengths and weaknesses, instead of always being 60s leading to drifting and desyncing one's rotation.

Pet AI is still atrocious as always. I've put up a good number of bug reports and problems here on the OFs as well as listing them on Akhmorning. In several regards it became worse. It's dumbfounds me how other pets are coded with anti-ghosting measures like Bunshin and Automaton Queen yet SCH Seraph and Demis are not while hosting a whole slew of other bugs and AI problems. There are tweaks they could do, but honestly I would prefer a big overhaul to move away from the old, broken and dated pet system into something more along the lines of Yuna's VFX in Dissidia. Only arcanist job players truly know the nightmare and pains of wrestling with awful pet AI just to hope things resolve when you want them to.

That said I do enjoy the job and probably will always do my part to enjoy it to the fullest. But despite its potential and performance levels it is far from a perfect job. Very strong with its toolkit yes, but not a god job like some make it out to be. I would rather a job that functions cleanly and is satisfying to execute without all the headaches, even if it meant damage not being as high, than clunk and genuinely broken systems.