As someone who recently came back as a PLd main I feel like putting in some two cents.

Imo while the loss of a number of my cooldowns took a while to get used to, I prefer the current system to having like, 6 versions of functionally the same skill. I'm not a really high level player and making sure to dodge attacks and deal with mechanics is enough on my plate without remembering which skills were on cooldown when things get hectic.

Another thing to think of is that at the end of stormblood I had a full 3 hotbars full of skills for combat. The extra skills from the next 10 levels would have not only raised the complexity of endgame even higher but also would have required another hotbar taking up space on my screen and requiring another set of key combinations so I feel that skill consolidation was basically a requirement.


Lastly in regards to the issue of the tank and healer jobs being the same nowadays, I blame the endgame community. It used to be that each of the tanks had the same goals but approached them in different ways. The problem is that while PUGs for mid range endgame would accept any tank, high end demanded whatever job was the current meta. At the time I had to take my hiatus the consensus seemed to be that if you weren't WAR you were crippling your party DPS. And anytime changes were made for balance it was always a source of drama. Can't blame them for making the jobs play the same. Far easier to keep things balanced and avoid complaints from whichever job got nerfed (or not buffed as hard) if they all have the same approach