This game is in need of character customization

[Gamemako]

Yeah, if you implement concrete stats like that. Things like elemental damage and resistance have more freedom to be versatile.

Right, because you're going to spec anything but fire damage for BLM? No, you're not. At best, you give the player the opportunity to screw up for certain encounters. Choose the wrong thing, the game laughs at you for being a fool and you lose. Choose the right thing, you get the same experience as everyone else.

If the classes where more freeform, you would be able to allocate stats to fit your playstile like it was originally intended;

Realizing, of course, that it didn't work. Your ability was pretty much the sum of the classes you had leveled -- it wasn't customization, it was accessing each awesome ability you could get. You didn't take Punishing Barbs because it fit your "playstyle", you took it because it was better than everything else.

Not really wrong, shallow but not wrong. We customized our gear with mix and match stats, because points are harder to reset. Doesn't mean a whm should go MND, it's just easier to go MND. The rest is still tweaked with gears.

You never use anything but pure MND on WHM unless you want to be gimped. There are no exceptions to this. If you want more of anything else, you sacrifice 4 MND to get 9-10 of any other stat you want (or several of those stats) along with extra secondary stats to make up some of the difference. The return is greater than 2:1 compared to using bonus stats. Even then, you would only do it to account for other gear weaknesses; if that were not the case, then ilvl90 accessories would be necessarily useless. There is no middle ground.

Bonus points are useful for preventing players from being two jobs from the same class, and that's about it.

Same with Vit vs dex vs str on war. Sometimes you want vit, sometimes you want dex and str.

Great example, because you don't spec STR or (lololol) DEX on WAR. DEX would never be used -- if you're really that ignorant about it, visit the tank forums some time -- and STR is only used if you're purely farming junk content and are already using pentamelded ilvl70 accessories (i.e. you're not doing endgame at all). BLM doesn't spec PIE, it specs INT and uses gear to get the necessary PIE without sacrificing an equal amount of INT. If ever the game put the player in a situation where BIS required trading a bonus point for PIE, then it wouldn't be a choice or a playstyle, it would just be the required build to do it the right way, with everything else being wrong and bad.