The main reasons behind the dissatisfaction of job gameplay

[Aravell]

I guess my issue personally is less with simplification (because I think any complexity we've ever had has been wholly artificial just for complexity's sake, maybe with the exception of BLM) and more with the fact that, complex or simple, job identity is basically gone, there's no player input or customization at all, and each job is so confined to its specific trinity role and fights are so meticulously scripted that there's just no...surprise in combat. Even if a fight is very difficult, it's still just automatically stale by the fact that it'll be exactly or basically exactly (accommodating small different permutations of mechanics) the same every single time. You never get the thrill of reacting to something unexpected.

For example, in GW2, Elementalists have a skill called "Rebound!" that negates the next lethal blow within five seconds for you and your allies and heals them instead. You don't have to be playing a healer build to use this skill; you can be full DPS and take it to help cheese a mechanic, or just save weaker players, etc. It allows for a lot of skill expression, and it's just one skill on one class. With the exception of maybe Rescue, FFXIV just doesn't have stuff like that, and it would be really cool if it did.

Complexity in Heavensward wasn't what I'd call artificial. Game knowledge carried you very far back then, skill expression was available and jobs had identity and nuance.

What we have now is completely artificial difficulty, I wouldn't even call it complexity. There's just 'do damage', 'increase damage', 'take less damage' and 'heal for X' abilities now, no nuance, no complexity, no skill expression, no gameplay. The whole game is basically on rails.