Well, I can start off by saying that I'm pretty sure SE intended to add more abilities by launch but weren't able to meet the date, I can't give you a hard source, though Mr. Happy reiterated this in every beta guide of the Jobs.
Aside from apperantly reading my post and in the same breath judging the post solely by it's title, here's what I think about this particular point.
There's a lot of incosistency. If you say that their vision wasn't to "radically transform" a class, how do you explain that this same vision turned a dps Arcanist into a full fledged healer? Or the same dot-focused Arcanist into something much more focused on pet abilities? This are major transformations that steer the job to a particular path. However there are some that didn't do it well. If you're trying to say that the ones that didn't do it well on changing the class into something unique was the intended way, like BLM or DRG, then we have a strong disagreement. WAR barely tanks like MRD, it has a whole new system to work on. Yes, it has roots of the MRD, but how will you support your argument when they will want to further transform the classes when they have more than one job to branch to?
Your idea is that since it shouldn't have to change radically, it doesn't need to have something that sets it apart from the class, which I don't believe is SE's vision at all. They should want to enrich the job through all of the roots that the FF franchise has to offer and make it more and more unique compared to the standard class it came from.
I'm perfectly happy with how WAR is done, for example, though there are some Jobs that could have be done better to establish themselves as something new and are in need of more things to make them unique. Be it abilities or traits.
I'm not wasting more text on this since I think I made my point pretty clear already, and so have you.