What even is the purpose of all those non melee/blm jobs?

[Valence]

So there has to be some kind of compensation for complexity or else there's no point in playing a more complex job.

Challenge? Satisfaction to play something harder? Being happy to pull it off anyone? You're conveniently overlooking this while this is literally the main driving engine behind people trying challenging things like savage, ultimates, etc. Your argument is not the crux of video game design you seem to take for granted, I'm sorry to say.

Honestly I'd love for them to just complexify the hell out of those taxed "noob jobs" if just to shut down that kind of argument for good. Having an intuitive design isn't mutually exclusive with having complexity on the side. Just take monk for instance, if you want to optimize, you're in for a ride, otherwise, it's not exactly hard. But then again, maybe some people will find it hard at a baseline level. I know people that can't wrap their head around proc jobs like DNC and BRD so...

That's a fair way to feel about it. I don't have a better answer except to say what I've already said; SE's job team seems to have, at least in part, given up the ghost when it comes to maintaining some kind of unique feel/value for each job. Ideally there would be a situation wherein each job has a low-ish skill floor, to allow for anyone to get in and pick the job up and play it decently, while also maintaining something within each job that allows for skill expression (i.e. a higher skill ceiling) so that players who want to be challenged can push themselves and their chosen job. Obviously not every job can do this; it's good to have some jobs in each role that are simpler than others, to cater to people who don't have the skill/motivation to push that skill ceiling. You want players to be able to enjoy the main content that the game has to offer after all. But I think part of the current job balance issues we've been running into comes down to SE wanting to broaden the game's appeal to a wider audience and the subsequent dumbing-down that this appeal attempt necessitates.

That doesn't make any sense to me. On one end you say that it's good to have approachable skill floors while having high skill ceilings for skill expression, and then say that it's good that some jobs just don't. People can still play a job perfectly happily even if they don't reach the absolute nirvana of optimization, in fact that's 99% of the playerbase.