The main reasons behind the dissatisfaction of job gameplay

[Valence]

Agreed 100% with total lack of player agency; it's a big one for me. It's been removed from every facet of the game, basically, so that the entire experience is on rails now.

But even bigger is that there are too many buttons, and almost all of them do the same thing: some damage. The ones with any side-effects mostly just establish a proper button-pressing order. Since there is no room or opportunity for variation in combat, they have to artificially enforce "complex" rotations by throwing more and more buttons on the pile. Take the Machinist's Hypercharge, for example: you press that, and it then allows you to execute a ten-button combo in which all ten of the buttons just do a bit of damage. So it would be functionally equivalent to Hypercharge itself doing big damage and then locking all your other buttons for seven or eight seconds. But it has to feel "complex," so the game makes you press the ten extra buttons.

Almost every job is designed this way, where, if you think about it too much, you realize that you're just pressing extra buttons because the game wants you to press more buttons, not because you're doing interesting things with your class or frantically responding to dynamic combat situations. Like Continuation on Gunbreaker is literally "your previous skill didn't do all of its damage, but you can press this extra button to do the rest of it." It's silly. I know people argue that it's part of a FFVIII fantasy, but it's not the same, because it's just another boring button on a hotbar.

Hypercharge is the epitome of artificially inflated difficulty through APM, exclusively relying on activity busyness to cover for the fact that it's just spamming the same buttons over and over until you get carpal tunnel. It's a remnant of their big new trend that showed up in ShB where every job suddenly had to become like WAR with Fell Cleave spamm (DRK Delirium, MCH Hypercharge, etc), because apparently it's funnier to spamm big moves instead of playing piano (like old Rapid Fire did with the main combo).

Now amusingly enough they've been moving away from this model a little by reducing the amount of Fell Cleaves (we went down to 3 instead of 5), and replacing abilities with new visuals like on the DRK Delirium combo or the PLD Blade combo, just to make it "feel different" and "less spammy". I don't know about you, but while I do appreciate the flavor in feel that it brings (this has to never be understated, even the new Blazing Shot feels great in comparison, it's snappy), it also hints to a somewhat bankrupt design behind that seems unable to find anything of actual interest to bring to the table.

But overall within their design that has tried to exclusively focus on encounters instead of jobs it only makes sense that they're trying to automate rotations by removing the thinking part of them as much as possible, to replace it with memory patterns and cranked up APM which are much more modern encounter friendly.