Picto sweeps

[Supersnow845]

There is no world in which PCT is harder than BLM. Setting up your burst is very easy because you can do it at almost any point of your filler rotation. In fact, they made setting up BLM burst much worse- the moment you need to burn Triple/Xeno for movement, you're sacrificing burst. Try to setup a 4x Xenoglossy+Triple Flare Star and Despair with current BLM and tell me it's easier than Picto.
What you're saying, historically, has also never worked out. If the job that's easier and has a raid buff and has utility does the same damage, the selfish job is never picked. This is exactly what happened to HW MNK/BLM/SMN, SB SAM and BLM, ShB BLM until the very end (when they buffed it to do the most damage in the game)... even in EW, the SMN clear rates were more than twice RDM and BLM combined. And, in fact, raid buffs are so strong that the fastest clears tend to be SMN, not even BLM.
There's just no world in what you're proposing is ever going to work.

Yes but in exchange with non standard gone BLM falls functionally into a single timeline per fight, if you can finish a standard line you finish it, if you can’t finish it then you go as far as you can then swap back to umbral ice, you can prepare PCT’s burst in advance but you also have to be able to execute it and PCT has far more variability in what you do outside of its burst. BLM is going to be buffed anyway because it’s DPS these days is assumed to basically use xeno only for damage which people won’t do with how rigid BLM is

BLM is likely still harder for its rigidity but they would be close, BLM isn’t the gigabrain job it used to be and PCT has way more moving parts than a lot of other jobs

SMN clear rates in EW are a pointless metric because SMN has healer level complexity, the healers themselves for example fall into the balance of the raid buff is stronger but the non raid buff is more played in both its subcategories. Raid buffs tend to scale over the course of the expansion but let’s not pretend like BLM is weak enough to be locking spots to PCT, especially since both will compete for both the caster and the second melee spot

BLM is in a bad position right now but it doesn’t absolutely have to be stronger than PCT

[Galvuu]

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Picto really has no punishment as long as you don't let your muses, gauge and white/black blobs overcap. In fact, the order in which you do things doesn't even really matter- whether you charge your gauge or your muses up is really up to your discretion, either order works. You can even start your 1-2-3, go into muses halfway through, then go into the subtractive combo, then come back to finish the original combo. It's surprisingly difficult to mess Picto up. A lot of stuff like Mog of the Ages doesn't even time out, so you have a ton of freedom in how you approach it/when you use it.
I certainly think it's harder than SMN, but I'm not even sure it's harder than the other two casters because you have very good on-demand mobility and only really get punished for overcapping/letting stuff stay on cd (same "punishment" RDM has). It has a lot of stuff, so it's hard to learn at first, but these parts don't even interact with one another. The muses are just strong ogcds, the color combos have their own system... the only interaction, really, is your starry muse granting you an instant cast of rainbow drip and reducing the cooldown of starry prism, I think. And the reopener isn't that hard, either, because you get a ton of free mobility and weave slots (another advantage Picto has, it almost functions like a healer where its gcds are all shorter than the recast, so you can always weave).

But this has nothing to do with the core argument I was making, which is that if a job with buffs does comparable damage to a job without buffs, the job without buffs is not picked at all (why would it? It's strictly worse). That's why I gave you list of historical examples where this has been exactly the problem. How difficult the jobs are to play doesn't even matter. Even if I think PCT's difficulty is very overblown.