Since the discussion has become entirely about SMN, and having been vocal about SMN not being great before, I'll just toss my 2 cents in.

SMN is a decent enough design, I just think it's unacceptable as a DPS job. If you took SMN's design and slapped it on a healer, I'd be ok with it. SMN's existence not only hurts the caster role, it also hurts the DPS role in general. The DPS role has only 1 job in combat, do damage, if you make that job as simple as possible, what else do they have to strive for? I get that people want a simple job to get into, but a simple job does not mean it has to have no growth available to it.

Let's look at RPR. It's a very simple job, the concept is simple and the rotation is simple, you can even choose to delay your positionals if you can't hit them. You can mash Enshroud the moment you hit 50 shroud gauge and you'd do fine, but if someone wants to hold gauge and do a double Enshroud during burst, they have that option available to them. SMN does not have that. SMN has no job-specific optimisation, you may be tempted to bring up that you can swap legos around for movement, but that's not job-specific optimisation, that's fight-specific optimisation. Every other DPS job has both types, SMN does not have job-specific optimisation, they only have very specific micro-optimisations to do, there is no point when you play SMN that you would suddenly be struck by an epiphany of "Oh, I should've been doing that instead!".

I believe that no DPS job should be so limited in growth opportunities. Every DPS job is already plenty simple to pick up and stumble through, we do not need one that you can stumble your way through to peak performance on.