Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Jeeqbit]

The 2-minute burst and making jobs bursty (like how Paladin was changed) was because of high-end duties generally, yes.

Since it's considered the highest end content in the game the playerbase tends to demand more parity there

I don't think it's just based on requests. I think SE wants it to be balanced regardless of requests.

In terms of having the same abilities, parity in that area is also demanded in casual content - for example "why doesn't PLD have a gap closer", "why doesn't DRK have as many heals", "why doesn't DRK have the same invuln as everyone else". There is absolutely no way they changed WAR's conal AoE into a circle for raiders. That parity was for dungeons.

they've been simplifying jobs as attempts to get more players into high-end raids

Yes and no. Yoshi-P said something like this long ago, and it's true: raids are sort of dangled at you like a carrot. You see others do them and get the rewards, and want to do them yourself because of peer pressure and to fit in. They are meant to be sort of a "goal" even if many players don't arrive at that goal.

So the aim is to make it more realistic to arrive at that goal. To that end, many changes were made:

• Savage was seen as too punishing so they made it easier in the final Heavensward tier and decided that was the difficulty level they wanted to copy to increase participation enough.
• Cross-world Party Finder was added late in Heavensward to make it easier to find people to PUG with on dead worlds.
• There were too many status effects to track, so they were replaced with Job Gauges in Stormblood and they began really making more indicators and telegraphs as the years went on.
• PFs were changed to have [Duty Complete] and [Practice] so that the toxic-looking messages were not needed ("2 chests, no bonus").
• Rotations were not intuitive enough, too punishing and some players did a fraction of their damage potential, so from Shadowbringers there was a much bigger drive to make rotations intuitive and easy to figure out - such as by removing enmity combos and stance dancing on tanks.

What could they do to help reverse course? Or should they, even?

I do not think they should "reverse" making rotations intuitive. I think this is a good thing. In the past, I saw tanks that would never navigate beyond spamming an enmity combo in tank stance, summon the wrong thing on SMN, or press a button wrong and lose half their damage for the next few minutes. It's hard to get a rotation so drastically wrong now, and they are just easier for new players to "figure out".

However, I do think a rotation can be "intuitive" and "dynamic" at the same time (such as by having skill trees, or ways to modify the playstyle via materia), as long as the defaults work just as well because most people stick to defaults.

I think jobs should be unique, to a certain extent. They achieved this in the past and it was fine. For example, all tanks achieved the same thing, but in different ways:

• PLD had raw mitigation/blocks.
• WAR increased HP and took damage, so they could heal it all back up or leech it back up with attacks.
• DRK was once a leech HP tank but became a magic shield absorb tank.
• GNB was a jack of all trades, master of none, with a notable regen idea.

Now they just gave all 4 of them all these things more or less, destroying the uniqueness.

You also had little things to contend with such as WARs having to aim their AoE, which not everyone was good at, and that little nuance was ripped from them.

Barely 10% of players do savage

30% of players clear the savage tier; probably even more prog it.

Ask yourself which type of content the Director enjoys and which is most useful to streamers who have his ear.

From their perspective, when they tried making non-raid content, they got attacked for it (Island Sanctuary etc), and concluded that they can't win whatever they do.