Which part of summoner's rotation am I meant to find satisfying?

[Deveryn]

Casting titan egi instead of summoning it and having nothing to manage while spamming ruin are two pretty severe problems. I don’t think anyone would call egi assaults perfect but at least they existed. Maybe they could have gotten away with being able to tie the egi to the boss’s movement as a pet action to reduce ghosting in most fights?

I’m not particularly convinced astral flow feels like anything other than busywork. This might be because you don’t fill the gauges, just spend them so it doesn’t really have any connection to your performance. Even gunbreaker (and samurai and warrior!) has a more involved gauge system

Boss fights weren't such a problem. It was the dungeons and the varying clusters of mobs and things being moved around. Ifrit had a cone attack which you could never hope to line up right. They weren't even taking damage anymore, but they could definitely get you some aggro if you targeted the wrong thing. There was also that delay where they were done attacking a target and then had to be sent to another. We needed more control of our DPS. There was so much wrong with SMN, but maybe some folks liked that. It would keep people away if it was buggy and not as fun as other jobs. SMN may seem too simple, but the DPS output and flexibility is consistent, compared to how it used to be.

Gauge filling is nothing more than a variable cooldown. We don't need it on every job. Gunbreaker is probably the least involved. You go through 2 or 3 combos and you're done and in earlier content you're probably not using in that much in favor of the AOE damage.