Robbing gap closers of damage makes the game even less fun.

[Lyth]

Damage neutral movement tools like Gyoten/Yaten are perfectly fine and add variety. You want players to have ready access to movement tools to open up more possibilities for fight design.

The problem with gap closers that provide a net dps gain is that damage takes priority over movement. This in turn leads to uninteresting target dummy fights where the designers don't want to move the boss often for fear of making players lose gap closer uses. I think it's in everyone's benefit to have movement tools that are designed for movement first and foremost, so that we can have more interesting fight designs going forward.

Movement tools in general are a great way to create design variety, because there are so many different ways of achieving the same effect. It's a bit of a shame that all the new gap closers introduced in Dawntrail seem to be Thunderclap analogues.

It still amuses me that the WAR playerbase successfully campaigned to replace their on-demand Onslaught with a standard 30 second recast gap closer that has to be used for damage. I think that really highlights that sometimes people just want to stick to what is familiar and safe, rather than what actually makes sense from a melee uptime perspective.

[Shurrikhan]

The problem with gap closers that provide a net dps gain is that damage takes priority over movement.

Not when the movement provides uptime that in turn provides higher damage.

When your relative potency-per-GCD is over 400 and using your gap-closer under damage every possible (raid)buff available to you is 50 potency higher than using it outside those raidbuffs, it still takes at most a third of a second for holding one of your 2+ charges for that movement requirement to be a net DPS increase.

Movement WAS gap-closers' primary means to net dps gain unless there were no potential loss of uptime to be had anyways. Which is a problem then with a lack of melee mechanics, replacing bosses increasingly with DDR striking dummy play, not with having some way not to waste the given button when it'd otherwise lack any use.

It's a bit of a shame that all the new gap closers introduced in Dawntrail seem to be Thunderclap analogues.

Why wouldn't they be, though, now that you've stripped them of damage? To-target damage-less skills are just objectively and needlessly limited if they only go to enemies. That effectively leaves En Avant-likes, Thunderclap-likes, or Shukuchi-likes, or being getting flavor only by being needlessly more limited than others. The flavor already existed prior, in

It still amuses me that the WAR playerbase successfully campaigned to replace their on-demand Onslaught with a standard 30 second recast gap closer that has to be used for damage.

You mean Nyx, Xeno, and all of ~4 others? A vocal handful does not a "playerbase" make. The rest were quick to point out that Onslaught being its 10s CD and spending gauge was integral to offensive minutia atop being a far more compelling and flexible tool than any "free" (read: tuned around use within raidbuffs) 30s CD would be.

Note: Onslaught also had to be used for damage before. It just did that through correcting gauge value and interaction with Internal Release, both more thematic, atop exploiting raid buffs.

[Lyth]

...

This partially comes back to designing fights such that 'perfect uptime' conditions are possible, which is why you see decisions like max-melee sized PBAoE. Actually forcing players off the boss makes players think about how many GCDs they can safely execute, and movement tools (especially extender/closer combinations like Gyoten/Yaten) let you stretch this to the limit. The counterpoint is that these should be designed to be brief disengagements, as nobody likes having to run a Flare marker over into the next arena.

I'm predicting that the shift to more damage neutral movement tools, alongside disengagement tools like the MNK fireballs and Viper's ranged gems, are designed to allow for more movement in fights along these lines, which is good for players in the long term. It just comes down to player buy in. Players always complain about feeling like they are 'losing out' on damage, which is why the old style of gap closers interfered with fight design. That's also why the WAR Onslaught change happened in the first place (and there most certainly were some heated debates over this on the tank forums, so it was far from a few people suggesting it).

As far as movement tools are concerned, I think that there are plenty of creative designs still out there, between speed boosts, hybrid speed + blink effects (Lost Impetus), interactable team teleporters, recall/rewind effects, substitution/swap effects (I'm surprised that NIN doesn't have a kawarimi wood block escape at this point). At this point you can just pick another game at random and start borrowing ideas for implementation. Having a fun movement toolkit is fundamental to players' enjoyment of many games. From a game design perspective, giving a player early access to a really exciting movement ability when zooming around a starter zone may make the difference of whether they keep playing or drop off their interest.