SUGGESTION: Turn Bluemage into a regular job - Limited Job>Advanced Job (An Approach)

[Shougun]

Technically not "funky" as that was the sole intentional design of how DRG was meant to be played. The interviews explained they ruined DRG by doing that, but also had the mentality that the players would eventually come up with a tactic they didnt forsee, and so they usually didnt bother fixing "nerfed" jobs. Only "too OP" jobs/abilities.
Of course the players didnt come up with a work around, but the developers came up with an alternative way to fix DRG, which was an indirect fix.
(1) Help all 2handers accuracy in ToAU.
(2) Make very low HP enemies who were weak to piercing damage. (This also helped THF, as it was also considered rather weak, and could use piercing dmg on the same enemy variety)
When it came to endgame, DRG was mostly fine as it was, so they didnt need to fix it for endgame bosses, so thats why they stuck to this halfhearted bandaid fix.

EDIT: according to the devs, regarding BLU, western players used BLU as a melee DPS. Japanese players mostly saw it as an equivalent to SMN. A job thats meant to be a Caster, but better off being used as a healer. (Most JP groups didnt let BLU DPS) The Devs said they personally saw BLU as mostly a Caster DPS. They mentioned this, as justification for nerfing BLUs melee DPS, and buffing nukes. BLU did need the buff to nukes, but the melee nerf was uneeded, as BLU was already one of the weakest DPS on normal mobs past Lv27. BLU didnt get most of its magical DPS until later, so this left BLU with a large level gap of being a really crappy DPS. (Roughly half the DPS of a normal damage dealer) and other gaps at the tail end, and start of this gap, which made it just slightly weaker. (maybe 20%? These are of course rough estimates)
So the devs did confirm there were intended to be DPS (Caster, not melee mage) but were also given options to be helpful in other fronts. (Melee options were intended for tanking, not for DPS, since they assumed u would be in melee range if u tanked, and melee spells should be weaker, since they didnt have cast bars. Im pretty sure they embraced the melee BLU at some point after i quit)

Really really early on in FFXI the multi hit combos used to give more tp back, so with samurai dragoon could near endlessly go from weapon skill to weapon skill. You're right that they made other changes to two handed weapons and stuff, but long long ago tp from multi hit attacks got a bit silly and they went out of their way to nerf it (iirc monk had this with their relic and their 8 fold attacks). Although that they nerfed it wasn't the point, just that by having certain sub jobs your play style shifted massively.


That we don't have that system, so the variety FFXI offered doesn't necessarily translate well here and that the variety wasn't a reflect on your main job as much as it was a reflection on your main & sub job together (like SMN/WHM makes you a main healer, but SMN on its own in that game was not a main healer). BLU / WHM is a main healer but BLU / NIN is definitely not.

Which again isn't to say you can't have blue be kind of special here in FFXIV, it's just that using FFXI comes with a whole bunch of funk that we don't have here and so BLU / WHM isn't necessarily == BLU. BLU is == to BLU (so like in FFXI if you never added a subjob to your BLU they'd be an awful main healer but still not a bad damage dealer). Although I want to add I agree with you that often the funk was intended lol.

As an aside I played BLU as a caster first (most of my time spent casting, although of course I absolutely took advantage of weapon skills and self combo'ing if there wasn't someone to work with), and didn't have anyone try to correct me on the western way to play (calling it that since you mentioned it like that, honestly first time I heard of it, but I also didn't read much in the way of guides)- but my name sort of got me into a lot JP parties even if I didn't talk almost at all so.. lol /shrug.