It's interesting to me when folks say that combining 1-2-3 combos into a single button would reduce the game's complexity. It makes me wonder: do you actually feel like there's any complexity in pressing 1, then pressing 2, then pressing 3? I don't.

I think I understand where these comments are coming from, though: broadly speaking, FF14 is a dirt-simple game that struggles to truly engage its players. Most of the time, the only actual engagement that players have is pressing their buttons in the pre-determined order for that expansion. And that isn't great, but it's also all we've got. So I understand the hesitance to let any of that slide away.

But personally, I think the instinct to hold on to any "complexity" regardless of the actual value its providing is misguided, in that by clinging to scraps we become less likely to get what we truly want. Recently, Yoshi-P has talked about how the devs try to be thoughtful about adding new buttons to jobs because they're aware of how the increasing the number of buttons beyond a certain threshold impacts different subsets of the player base. (Whether you agree or disagree with that philosophy, it's unlikely that he'll change his tune on that.) So given that context, why would you want to waste any of the those limited button slots on the 2, 3, and 4 of combo actions? Wouldn't you rather compact the filler garbage into a single button so that you could have more buttons that actually do something compelling?

In short, every button we have that doesn't do something truly engaging is a button that's taking up space that could be occupied by something better.