PCT is far behind both of those jobs in adps- as it should. It's slightly ahead in cdps... which is fine? Like, it has a damage steroid, which will inflate its rdps, and it's a bursty job, which will inflate its cdps. Why must those two be top of the charts for cdps again?
I don't know what you mean by "NIN doing more dps" is a problem "because it has a buff". Doing more rdps? It's fine, like you said, it has a buff. More cdps? Maybe ok? It's bursty and has a buff, you need to go case by case. More adps? Yes, that one would be wrong, and a definite problem. But PCT isn't leading in adps so...
I disagree with your take on 90% or 95% being ok. I sometimes join parties as PCT to get parses and I can tell you the following:
- If you don't get decent crits, you're not getting an orange;
- If your party dies just before burst, or has brink of death, or has their burst totally misaligned, you're not getting an orange;
- On that note, if the party buffs drift, PCT suffers a lot. Sometimes people throw up Divinations or Litanies like 30s late, and I'm out of juice and painting motifs for 12s while doing literally 0 dps under the drifted buffs.
Maybe you can overcome one of these with a lot of crit under burst, or your party gigachadding while your buff is up, but tick two of these and your rdps and cdps nosedive. That's why, out of all jobs, you need to be very careful with high PCT parses. When the stars align, if your team is competent and you're knowledgeable, you tear the boss apart.
But I play primarily on the pf and df. My parties are mostly random, their performance is random. I don't want my job to be tuned to the top 5% statics when I don't have the benefit of such a group. I already feel the pain of not having a rez when half my group suicides to Honey Bee's "love me tender" or whatever her heart spam is called. Speaking of which...
Melee flexibility means being able to keep perfect uptime while running around as long as the boss is in range. No caster can do that. For example, if you get a bad pattern on M3 with the emerald weapon mechanic into gravity puddles into lariat combo because your party moved wonky, you kinda just take the gcd loss and can't do anything about it, which is the opposite of what you describe as free uptime (actually, the mechanic you're talking about in P10S is also crap for BLM if the party isn't cooperative, which is basically every time in the pf). You also simply don't have enough Swiftcasts for how much *insert mechanic that's annoying for casters here*. It's still up in the air how the Savage fights will be designed, but we'll undoubtedly have aoe vomit of some variety that will force casters to run around while potentially losing gcds. Once again, you're not considering that melee can run around while hitting the boss if they're within max melee. It's impossible to keep caster uptime on that mechanic on some aoe/heart patterns (which are aimed at people, so they're borderline random) because you need to run around in random directions for a good 8-10s.
See how I can construe the same argument for casters? Have you ever played BLM or PCT in your life? You're under this impression they can run around for free no biggie for an arbitrary length of time. You'll find that is not true. Melee really did forget how to work for uptime, any friction is a crime and "casters have it real good" now.