Quote Originally Posted by ForteNightshade View Post
Because the dev team themselves seem to adhere to the same philosophy: accessibility to its absolute extreme. We saw this as early as Stormblood when HW Dark Knight was completely overhauled because some people cried it was too difficult to play but they didn't want to play Warrior or Paladin since "Dark Knight's way cooler!!!" Shadowbringers is when it really took off though. Bard was completely gutted because, again "too hard!!" The healers are what they are now and tank mechanics have slowly been eroded. All so little Timmy can pick whatever job he likes based on little more than aesthetic.

The irony is Yoshida's seeming frustration with criticizing towards the two minute meta ("everyone needs to come to a consensus"), healer design ("Just go play Ultimate.") and even job changes (Kaiten and "button bloat") are all directly the result of them catering so much to a crowd that didn't care about those things to begin with.
Here's how I would handle starting job levels in hindsight, if it were me in charge:

Every job added after ARR would start at level 30 and is accessible as soon as the player hits level 30. When new jobs are added, at the start of the expansion, there would be an EXP event for those new jobs that would drastically increase the amount of EXP gained form all sources for those jobs until maybe around X.05, or even X.1 until that job reaches the former level cap. In the upcoming examples, Viper and Pictomancer would start at 30, but might be receiving a 5x EXP modifier not just for defeating enemies, but for things like roulette bonuses and Wondrous Tails, etc until those jobs hit level 90. So anyone looking to play the new expansion with that new job would basically cruise through levels rapidly.