I don´t know what you want. I´ve said more than one time that i would be fine with more support abilities or deeper gameplay, even better mechanics where the mobility of ranges is going to shine / which aren´t so easy to play. Someone else came up with parsing percentages and ranks, i answered, you answered and here we are. If you want to talk about such stuff, maybe bring some ideas up, instead of replying like "we´re only here for the 1%, mobility isn´t worth anything, etc.?!"
That those "metaslaves" exist is real, especially in the upper 10% of the players who plays more endgame content than anything else. You answered it by yourself, "Double range was popular". Do you see them permanently right now? I don´t on my datacenter and the amount of blackmages / double-caster groups definately increased due to its preference on the current content.
And for any scenario you come up with, there is the opposite scenario too. It´s not like SE is ignoring phys. range on purpose or whatever. They obviously have a plan when they dumb down one class after the other and hey... bard got that 10 potency buff and now it seems to fit the numbers SE wanted to get. Otherwise we would´ve seen more buffs/nerfs i guess.
And yes, i know about those melee friendly bosses. 2/3 from 12? And how many are caster friendly? 6,7,8, maybe even 10? And phys. range friendly? 12/12?
Tbh, if it wouldn´t be about DPS in the first case, you wouldn´t open that big barrel about it. And you still missing a clear fact, you are you, i´m who i´m. It might be easy for us to play any class, to adjust to any content, whatever, but this is not a thing for the majority.
EDIT: And please don´t come with "but you´ve said this or that about DPS,..." now. I´ve named it once, followed by a novel about the lack of class design overall and primitive boss mechanics in my first post. That SE dumbs down everything and that any boss follows a strict design pattern, no matter the poor spread/stack RNG mechanics, is the REAL ISSUE behind boring gameplay and the lack of needed raid support. Point and click seems to be SE´s goal... i can´t wait that 19 classes will only have 3 buttons left and the bossfights will take no longer than 1 minute with AOE -> tankbuster -> RNG stack/spread -> GG.