Quote Originally Posted by Supersnow845 View Post
How do they justify SMN’s changes as good in the longer term if all it took was one new caster and a few balance changes to send it to the bottom again
This is the issue with butchering jobs to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You're alienating the people who genuinely loved the job to cater to a crowd that is transient by nature. They move to whatever job is flavor of the month while the former diehard mains of that job are driven away from the game. In the long run it's a net negative.

The funny thing is a very similar scenario to this has already played out in WoW. The devs responded to much of the same feedback you see in this community about button bloat and whatnot by pruning all the classes to almost nothing, which was a very miserable and not fun era. It took years of complaints but they eventually realized they were listening to bad feedback and reversed course. SE seems to have made a similar realization when it comes to the boss design so hopefully they're thinking the same thing about the jobs leading up to 8.0, but I can't say the job design decisions in Dawntrail have given me much hope in that regard.