Positionals

[Lyth]

It's important to ask yourself why you want to specifically play a melee job in contrast to a ranged one. The main reason is to add extra depth and challenge to fights by introducing a spatial constraint to your gameplay. That's why there was pushback against the hitbox sizes in the raid content that we've been seeing as of late. If the hitbox fills the arena, then you're removing that constraint, and you might as well be playing a ranged job at that point.

Positionals are another such constraint, in that they reduce the acceptable target area even further. So it's no longer enough to just know where a boss is going to be positioned in the arena, you also need to know how they orientate themselves on a GCD by GCD basis. And it can be very satisfying when you gain that additional layer of knowledge about a fight's 'choreography' and can translate that into a performance gain.

If none of this rings true with you, then melee isn't going to offer any appeal over a ranged one. If we remove all spatial constraints on melee, then you're left with a ranged job. And we have lots of those already (more than melee). We've seen a steady simplification around melee gameplay in the name of making the role more accessible, in terms of reducing positional counts and making missed postionals less punishing (potency loss rather than breaking combos). I think if you erode it further, the category might as well not exist.