See, I don't agree with balancing damage output against utility, because you can't compare the two. It's fine to balance damage output against raid damage buffs. I'd even argue that it's fine to balance damage output against considerations around uptime, resource generation, and burst, although you have to be careful because these can be very variable based off of fight design.

If players are bothered by the power balance of raises, then that needs to be independently assessed. Perhaps there should be a cap on raises per character/party that varies with the difficulty level of the fight. You just need to identify other ways for 'lower utility' jobs to gain more utility. Although I'd love to see a MCH with a jumper cables/defibrillator raise some day.

I have mixed feelings about the role actions system. It's convenient for standardizing common skills without having to invent new ones, although I wish that there was a way to optionally glamour over the animations to give some job specific flair (like Shadowskin/Foresight for Rampart, for example). I think that the anti-knockback tools are really just there as a timing check, for situations like cape/water Pinax. It's probably one of the role actions that gets tested more frequently. I think it's the interrupt mechanics that need a review. I think it's cool to be able to shut down a specific attack, or even adjust its effectiveness. But perhaps they can be bundled in with the likes of the Reprisal effects and merged down to one such ability per role that mitigates and situationally shuts down special actions. Like if they wanted to keep Sleep, they could just give it the Addle effect ('drowsy') and have it conditionally put special mobs to sleep.

I think that there are plenty of ways to do a pure fluff action that's fun but doesn't provide any real combat advantage. Like if you could strike up a conversation with a Voidsent out of combat as a Reaper, Float into the air as a WHM, or disguise yourself as another character or NPC as a NIN. When you look at it, Mug still has that oddball effect which lets you 'steal' extra items from mobs as a finishing blow. These things are unnecessary from a combat standpoint, but they do add a bit of interesting flavor. They don't need to be a part of the action budget, either.