What’s the point when BLM’s newfound success is PCT and SMN’s loss?

[FlorineC]

So explain to me why Picto was genuinely well received while being easy to play ;but then when black mage gets that buff, people are upset.
So do people want hard jobs or easy jobs?

Speaking for myself, I want interesting jobs, and Picto is an interesting job. I would personally say it's one of the more difficult jobs currently in the game so I guess take that for what you will, but it has a lot of flexibility and room for optimization that a lot of other jobs sorely lack while still requiring a good amount of planning for optimal play, and I find that engaging. I previously mained SMN from ARR through EW, and while I enjoyed the novelty of EW SMN for a bit, it got old fast for me not necessarily because it was easy, but because there was just so little decision making or skill expression in the class (whether there's a meaningful distinction between that and easiness there I'll let you decide), and it was/is extremely rigid on top of that. Your agency was boiled down to whether or not you could find ~6 seconds per minute to actually cast a spell, and then the class played itself otherwise. Conversely, I think you can have easy classes that are still interesting and engaging on some level, and have room for optimization. I think SB PLD was a good example of this. You followed a pretty simple rotation, but moves like Shield Swipe in conjunction with Sheltron and Bulwark gave you room to eek out some extra damage if you wanted to. Hell, Sheltron itself only covering a single hit made it a relatively small but skill testing move to fully take advantage of, and it felt really good when you timed it to catch a big hit and not the auto attack 1 second before that.

At the same time, there's classes like Bard which is imo the hardest class in the game right now, but that I don't find very fun just because I don't feel like its kit meshes together very well. The dots feel so vestigial because procs are no longer based off of them and you refresh them both with a single gcd, the way procs change between songs feels awkward to me (thank god they made pitch perfect aoe so your song order isn't constantly fucked in dungeons anymore at least), and there's just too many separate little things to juggle that it doesn't feel like a cohesive class to me. I don't think it's as simple as people either blanket like or dislike hard jobs so why did they like X which was easy but not Y which was also easy, there's a lot of other factors at play in what we find fun or not. Sure, there's some level of correlation where if you're looking for something more active or with more room for skill expression, you may tend to like harder jobs more, but difficulty isn't the only, or even the primary thing factor for a lot of people.