Make Monk great again! 5.4 Monk doesn´t feel like Monk anymore...

[Guesswhat]

...horrible moves nobody liked such as Featherfoot and Haymaker, how PB was on a 3-minute cooldown...

Those moves were good for solo play, but next to useless in parties. I liked them; not every skill have to revolve around party play. One ilm punch could have been useful outside PvP too, but SE rarely made it relevant in party-PvE, "the real way to play", so, of course, peeps complain.
Perfect balance on 3 min CD was overkill, yes.

As you mention later, Axe kick, imo, it could solve many "problems" with Monk's GL maintenance. In fact PB and AK could be everything Monks need to keep GL up on a rotation that could include Tornado kick. Form Shift could maintain it during long pause in fights. But SE decided to separate PvP and PvE from the beginning, thus not making this an option.

Imo, the removal of GL is another dumbing down to the lowest common denominator. Everything seemingly have to revolve around the holy trinity, and if not, peeps can't stop complaining and SE will eventually give in.

Keeping GL up was never that big of a deal, but apparently I'm in the minority on here. I agree with most that Stormblood, the "Monk expansion", made the Job much worse and that "fixes" they applied just messed things up further.

But it does not take away from my experience that I find doing dungeons to level as a Monk is more of a chore than the other classes, and this change to GL totally removes this negative feeling for me. If anything, it has made it one of the jobs I enjoy leveling now haha...

LOL, so since I like GL, should I expect SE to add similar mechanics to classes I don't like to level. Please, SE, add GL to Bard, else it's a chore to level it.
It's OK to not like every job and not have every job leveled. In fact, that there are jobs that don't cater to everyone, should make the game more interesting.
SE, of course, goes by majority vote. Understandable from a business perspective, yet disappointing as hell. Can't upset muh holy trinity!

[ValStormbreaker]

Those moves were good for solo play...

Being someone who plays a lot of Guild Wars 2 lately, I can appreciate the idea behind wanting Featherfoot as a dodge and Haymaker as a follow-up. It sounds great on paper. I don't think it worked out terribly well in its implementation and in practice, though, and that's regardless of whether we're talking about solo or group PvE. I don't think the game engine at its state at the time was really equipped to make the most of the idea.

I get that SE wanted to keep PvE and PvP separate, but it's not like there aren't PvE moves also present in PvP. They just work differently in PvP. My concern is the PvP-exclusivity of certain moves that would actually fix issues in PvE quicker and in a more cost-effective manner than waiting so long on allegedly expensive job changes due to schedule and budget reasons. Migrating a skill over to PvE is simple when the animation and icon are already in game, so there's no additional cost to make a brand new skill involved.

Speaking of Axe Kick, imagine if Anatman (which puts you into the Anatman "state" in your status enhancements) used pre-pull did what form shift does now (which is essentially only there to be like Meditation, where instead of having to push the button many times it just gives you all your chakra at once, so if the tank is a Leeroy Jenkins who doesn't give you a countdown, you can just start the fight without having to lose 3 GCDs waiting to go into Opo-Opo form), and maxed out your chakra stacks like meditation. Now imagine if it also changed Shoulder Tackle to SB-style Wind-Tackle. Here's what the opener would start out with:

Wind Tackle > Demolish > Riddle of Wind double-woven with Axe Kick

Congratulations, you're not even at the second GCD yet and you're now at max 3 stacks of GL in FoF. Do your vanilla ABC rotation and swap to FoW to get to 4 stacks.

I'll raise you another version. Instead of Wind Tackle, it's PvP Riddle of Wind, where each shoulder tackle gives you a stack of GL. You'd max your GL stacks before reaching the second GCD.

If you could get up that quickly, nobody would have an issue with GL. The problem is that they gave us an extra GL stack to go faster, but instead of keeping the ways of getting our stacks up that we had, they took it away, forcing us to take longer to wind up. That's kind of counter-intuitive to the idea to giving us an extra stack of GL, which is where the whole problem was. One step forward, two steps back. Not sure what the thinking was there, unless they were concerned MNK would be too powerful and they tried to shackle it back. In that case, I think the smarter thing to do would be to just make MNK play fluidly, and then deal with potency adjustments later as needed. Nobody cares how powerful the job is if it plays like garbage.

(continued in another post due to the character limit)

[Guesswhat]

I can appreciate the idea behind wanting Featherfoot as a dodge and Haymaker as a follow-up. It sounds great on paper. I don't think it worked out terribly well in its implementation and in practice, though, and that's regardless of whether we're talking about solo or group PvE. I don't think the game engine at its state at the time was really equipped to make the most of the idea.

Iirc it worked quite well when, lets say you solo a FATE boss. Combined with Keen Flurry the boss could stay slowed a lot. It certainly helped. Featherfoot guaranteed you get a proc on heymaker.
I agree that it doesn't have much application besides these kind of niche situations, but, imo, having niche actions gives the game more flavor. But, of course, maintaining these kinds of things isn't really practical with the philosophy SE have had towards the game since the beginning of FF14.

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything else you say, however, the problem I had with SB expansion was mainly the slowdown of RoF, physical only buff on brotherhood and tackle mastery being too situational aka useless. I know I kinda sound like a hypocrite since I just defended Haymaker for niechness, but at the time SB came out, it was way too obvious SE weren't going to cater to anything else than mainstream appeal; the tackle mastery and physical damage buff thing were a really odd design choices with that in mind. SB was also the time they completely separated PvP and PvE which really left a sour taste in my case. Some of the ideas SE had on PvP Monk could absolutely "fix" the GL "problem" as you mentioned.
The worst part SB added though, imo, was random procs to Monk. I hate random procs; can't stand them. A personal thing I guess.

Imo, when it comes to monk, SE has always taken more steps backwards than forward, at least since HW.