Probably a mistake to wait almost 500 posts into a huge thread to write a novel about it, but I do love Summoner and this seems like the place everyone is congregating.

I've played all the games up to XIV in the series and summoning magic was always one of my favorites. I suffered through it in XI, and I've played it primarily in XIV since it was added in 2.0. There's not much that would convince me to leave the job when I like the concept so much, but I never really liked the way it played as a "poison mage" in XIV. Again, I still played it primarily because it's a Summoner, but as many people have pointed out in this thread and others over the years, it's really obvious they just reskinned WoW's warlock class with FF names.

When I first saw the changes I knew the people who have played it as it was, with its really technical rotations and proneness to massive failure on a mistake, would not enjoy how simple it was going to be. But I also knew I was going to love it more because it finally was going to let me play the job closer to the summoning magic in games I grew up with from FFIII to IX. I don't really care about complexity at all - I can do it, I did fine with the intricacies of 4.x SMN - but I don't have any particular interest in it being that way. And I was totally right, I love the new Summoner, and it's really fun cycling through the different types of spells that each summon gives alongside their big flashy summoning.

That said, there are a lot of little things that annoy me, pretty much all of them already having been mentioned in this thread. Carbuncle just sitting there staring at you is weird; why is he even there if he only powers two abilities? I'm glad to see the focus on DoTs gone and replaced with a focus on summoning magic, so why is Ruin and the Aetherflow stuff all still there? And biggest of all, I felt like this big overhaul was their chance to give us more or different summons but it's still just Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda like it's always been. I don't think we need to have every primal that's in the game, but it would have been nice to see at least one more of the elemental summons instead of zero. It's also a bit unfortunate that all of this new stuff comes at 86 and 90 - before 86 the gemstone summons barely feel different from each other, and before 90 they don't have their full looks and attacks resulting in the same weird disconnect as the previous incarnation - why can we summon big full Phoenix and Bahamut before we can handle an equivalent Ifrit?

I feel like they could have created some pretty easy solutions to multiples of these problems at a time. For instance, keep Carbuncle as our constant companion but make it so that rather than being replaced by the others while they're out, all the Aetherflow stuff is actually being done by Carbuncle, making Aetherflow more thematic, Carbuncle less pointless, and still giving SMN some buttons to press during cooldowns. Or go the opposite direction and get rid of Carbuncle and Aetherflow/Ruin, and just make both spells and abilities all change to corresponding elements rather than just spells. And since pretty much every gemstone summon spell other than maybe Slipstream is just for flavor and a different feel rather than a necessary part of a rotation to keep up, put the other half of the elemental summons as gemstones following the other trance - after Bahamut get Ifrit/Titan/Garuda, and after Phoenix get Ramuh/Leviathan/Shiva (or redistribute them to match light/dark aspects).

Overall, despite all these things I think they could have gone even further with, I'm really happy to finally feel like a Summoner instead of a Warlock. And I know it sounds rude, but for the people who loved the complexity or difficulty of execution rather than because it's a Summoner in a Final Fantasy game, there's a ton of other jobs to pick from that are tough to get right but rewarding when you do, like Black Mage.