I've been a BLM main since I started playing. I still want to be one but this version of the job just feels bad and has so many small frustrations.

I agree so much with what the original poster said about thunderhead, it's just frustrating having to think about it. There are times when I'm about to cast it and the timer drops and it's just confusing. It feels like unnecessary jank that I now have to track.
I would rather they let Thunder be instant and always usable or at least increase the duration of the thunderhead buff. The buff is currently the same length as the DoT, so if you use the High Thunder to weave transpose into the AF1 Firestarter, the ideal reapplication becomes just as the buff is about to drop which is also at the end of a tight fire line under low spell speed.

Swapping to fire and using the Firestarter is ok but it just feels so tight to use it every time. Now that the optimisation is simple it feels mandatory to do it and you feel forced to try and make it work.
In 6.X, the optimisation was complex. I knew that I wouldn't be the best but there were always small bits I could learn for marginal gains if I wanted and I like that being there.
I didn't feel pressured to learn all of it because I knew it wasn't necessary. There were some basic improvements I did and after that it was diminishing returns.
Now there is only one optimisation with firestarter, I feel obligated to use it because I know that is how you do the most damage and it feels bad to not do it.

The manafont change sounded ok before I played it but it's just so much fire that I barely have time out of it to spend polyglots. I'm now also worried about drifting it.

6.X BLM felt so good, it was so free flowing and fluid and now it's so rigid, with no ways to correct it's rigidity. I'm playing PCT at the moment which is quite fun but I can't stop thinking about how I would rather be playing previous BLM.

I loved non-standard, it was so much fun and more accessible than outsiders realise. 90% of it was just swap to ice, use some instants and do a short fire line.
It took a bit of time to get used to actually using it but it felt so satisfying. Learning about it filled a lot of the time for me between patches whilst there wasn't much content and having these new options made me enjoy the new raid in P9-P12 so much more.
E.g. the double transpose opener, involved an early refresh of thunder which gave the thunder DoT a very different alignment for the rest of the fight.
The first time I used this to make it align better for movement for the rest of the fight felt awesome.

I hope SE bring back ice paradox or leave some more room for optimisation. Another suggestion I like is allowing Flare Star to work with fewer stacks for less damage. I really like everything content wise about Dawntrail so far but I just wish BLM didn't feel so bad :/
Please can we have less jank and more room for creativity SE? Please?