Ultimately Kaiten had to go. It comes down to a simple principle of DPS design. Do not do in two ogcd presses what you could have done with one.

Kaiten was not a meaningful decision. You never made the decision not to Kaiten, unless you'd made a big mistake. Once you got your groove going, Kaiten was a sure thing, always, every time. What this meant was that Iaijutsu was always, every time, going to be Kaiten'd no matter what.

So, if Kaiten doesn't serve as a decision point, and your Iaijutsus are always, without exception, two button presses, why must it be two button presses? Is there a reason (other than preserving muscle memory, or you like the animation) to make it 2 button presses?

And the answer is, no. There really isn't.

So a question that also needs to be asked is why the devs never reacted to your attachment to Kaiten, and your clear love of the button?

The answer is: You never expressed any love for Kaiten. Never. When people talk about the high points of Samurai, they talked about Midare Setsugekka and they talked about Senei and they talked about Oni and they talked about Tsubame.

But they never talked about Kaiten, except 'You hit this button every time you do Iaijutsu.' Ya'll just talked about it like it was--it was just a button you hit because you had to.

So they treated it like you talked about it--like a button you just had to press.

Then, when they announced Samurai burst was being redistributed (which is part of the reason behind the change, as a nerf to Dancer and Bard and other raid-wide burst windows), you reacted with some strange cultish emotional attachment to Kaiten that frankly is out of nowhere.

So... forgive me if I don't exactly believe ya'll when you say Kaiten is THAT important and THAT beloved. I think there's a different reason, and that the Kaiten-Bargaining is just an emotional response to something deeper.

I think ya'll are seeing Samurai is not leading the DPS charts, and you're afraid that nerfs to synergy will keep it there and you're afraid that the devs don't want Sam to be good.

And this is a reasonable fear.

But here's the problem. If they bring back Kaiten, they're going to gut the potencies of Iaijutsu and Tsubame to compensate, or they're going to make Kaiten enable the auto-crit, but what they're not going to do is revert the old potencies and put the power back in Samurai burst. They've said that reducing that burst and putting that power elsewhere is their intention, so Kaiten coming back won't get you your big dick MSG crits back. So when you ask for Kaiten back, ask yourself--if they're going to keep Samurai burst low anyways, is this actually what you want? Or, is what you want actually the samurai burst back?

And unfortunately, because Samurai is making Dancer and Bard degenerate compared to Machinist (making the ranged role exceedingly difficult to buff) they can't exactly revert the old Samurai power distribution, can they?