Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Lyth]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty. If rotations bore you now, they would have equally bored you in Heavensward.

The key differentiator has always been fight design, not job design. If players are uncertain whether it's possible to obtain more uptime or not, then you have an actual performance differentiator. And that generally happens when you are given interesting positioning and movement mechanics. The perceived difficulty change after Heavensward has nothing to do with circular AoEs (?) or loss of pet management (???) as was suggested in the OP. It's a trickle down effect from the fact that bosses are designed to position themselves and move in a scripted and predictable fashion to assist you with doing damage.

Somewhere along the line over the past few expansions, fight design feels like it has shifted away from a Trinity based design where boss movement is controlled dynamically by your team (i.e. tanks) in response to less predictable fight conditions to an ARPG type design where the fight designers script the events and movement completely. But job design hasn't reflected that change. Every fight is a target dummy fight, interspaced with standardized intermissions. If boss movement is going to be predictable, then there needs to be a lot more forced movement, not static phases of hitting bosses while watching their cast bars tick up. This also means that players need more interesting movement tools to keep up with increased movement demands.