FFXIV's Systems Ain't That Deep, but They Could Have Been.

[Renathras]

100% this:

What I can say is there is a large amount of success that has happened with the Blue Mage method, Logos Actions and Lost Actions.
...<also BLU stuff>

...uh...yes, but no.

For every person that delved deep into those systems, you had people that...didn't.

Ask anyone about Delubrium and what will they tell you? As much as they praise it, everyone has a story - lots of stories - of people who zoned in with no Lost Actions, or poor ones, weak versions of essences, or worse, no essences, or even WORSE, Veteran essences.

I liked Bozja, but I never really delved into it other than using the mid-level essences. I heard stories about lightning fast Monks or White Mages that could cause another Sundering, but...I just slotted Protect and Shell and pretended I was in ARR again (except having a separate button for Shell and neither being partywide anymore BUT being castable on other people outside of my party, so that was nice...)

For every person that digs deep into those systems, you have others that don't, or don't even realize the power to them. Or don't even realize they're THERE. I didn't know about the WHM god of destruction build(s) until well into EW when I heard rumors of them. I still don't know what they were other than that they apparently existed. I've dabbled in BLU ("dabbled"; I have the complete spell book and an at least functional healer build and gearset I found from a guide), but the full power there I still haven't done much with...though granted, at least part of that is not being that interested in doing group content on a supposedly "solo" Job.

...and the thing is, this is why one of your statements is wrong:

"So SE can make something like this work, they just don't."

...because it DOESN'T work. Therein lies the problem. Many people don't get it, or don't even realize it's there TO get. Others that get it actively groan when they see those people, and try to exclude them. This is seen by SE (and I can't say they're wrong) as a failure state. As it not working. And that's why they don't do it. Now, granted, they could make it both easier and force the issue - for example, in Bozja, what if instead of collecting essences, they were received at various rank tiers as you ranked up/ unlocked the content, and didn't have charges (so you didn't have to buy/farm them and they didn't run out), and the game manually required you to use one before you could leave the starting areas of the content, so you HAD to have one equipped at all times, AND each time you got a better one, it would overwrite the lower levels (so you COULDN'T use the bad ones), AND you never ran out so you didn't have to farm any, AND the game gave you the higher level ones as you went?

...well, then it would be NEARLY foolproof ("something something they just make a better idiot..."), but then...where's the fun? It's basically automated at that point, just the busywork of clicking Ordained or Aetherweaver and having no other options anyway, defeating (most of) the point in even having the option to begin with. At that point, you may as well not have them since there aren't really any builds at that point and everything has had the fun optimized out of it. And if you DO make the choices meaningful, you then run into people making PF groups so they can "filter" out the "wrong" people.

Giving up on something because you aren't immediately good at it means you will never get better.

Yet there are some dead end paths that should be abandoned. "Sunk cost fallacy". If something is really bad, it would be better to start over again than to try and fix something that is unfixable, or would be far more costly to fix than just starting over again. This isn't true of everything, but there are some things in life better abandoned.

How do you know they didn't try and in the end, came to the conclusion that it added nothing?

This could be the same for everything said in this thread. You could iterate and try and improve, but what if still didn't fix issues?

Going back to Cross Class, how could it be improved?

I feel like there ARE some possible ways (for one, make useful stuff from every Job, not nerfed/useless stuff - Blizzard 2 was still such an odd choice for Cross-Class for anyone other than...I guess SCH? Didn't even give Umbral Ice for MP regen - THAT would have made it useful!), but anything that didn't add power was worthless, and anything that did became mandatory. It, and systems like it, were doomed from the start for that reason.

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Also, did anyone else get a YouTube video posted like a day ago in their feed after this? The one with the cat girl in the pinkish shirt?