"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells"

[Carighan]

They liked the additional difficulty of casting spells, and they liked trying to manage Astral Fire in the midst of battle mechanics.

I readily sympathize, but I also feel it should be self-explanatory that unless your entire combat+class system is built around the idea of easy/medium/hard jobs and can work with the inherent issues that brings with it, you don't truly want jobs being extreme outliers, regardless of in which direction.

And yes, this of course also points a finger at Summoner+Viper (for being ridiculously too easy to play, at least Summoner doesn't deal too much damage doing it but that in turn is exactly one of the problems of a system where classes have different inherent difficulty...), and also until now at Pictomancer which was left quite OP despite being ~medium to play optimally, and way too easy to survive hectic encounters with comparing all other casters, even Summoner. But since whataboutism is a type of fallacy, that is not really an excuse to not fix Black Mage, being inherently too complicated to play for it's output and ability to influence the outcome of a fight.

Sure, if the whole game were built around the idea that you have easier and tougher jobs, sure. And I'd like that, but I don't think FFXIV wants to be that game, none of the jobs show signs that this is intentionally built into them. Consider how much easier Blakc Mage was before more and more stuff was bolted onto it, even after the changes now the job is still more involved than it used to be. Consider also how other jobs inherently become easier as you prolong their burst phase (for example Red Mage, who is mobile during all the extensions they got), while Black Mage inherently gets more difficult the more you staple onto Fire Phase. It's not inunderstandable that it'll eventually reach a tipping point where the devs want to reign it back in.

And even if the opinion of the devs were the other way around, difficulty-of-job built into the game opens a whole new can of worms. Do easier jobs have a lower maximum output at their (lower) skill ceiling? Does that mean Ultimates are balanced to only be cleared by the most complex jobs to play? Or are the jobs balanced in output regardless, hence ultimates are designed for only Viper/Picto/Summoner/Warrior/etc? (that last part is a problem the game already has, and consider that in 10x worse if it were intentionally done that way)