What I envisioned for Summoner

[Enkidoh]

This is not to argue that the current SMN is not a good class or can't DPS et al. It's just again, not a Final Fantasy summoner.

You're right in that it can definitely be improved, but I quite like how the egis are at the moment - they're small enough to be manageable and at least are reflective of their overall power - the player Avatars in FFXI for instance were nothing but watered down versions of the real thing. Still potent, but nothing like what they should be despite being the same size as the 'true' Avatar (which is the same technical reason why the egis are so small in ARR is why certain summons still will never be summonable in XI, like Bahamut - they're just too big!).

And contradicting what I said earlier about the storyline not allowing proper summoning of Primals, it seemed in 1.0 the storyline actually was setting up the player that they could in fact summon a Primal themselves, but ultimately that part was developed other than a brief discussion during one 1.0 story quest and it was never mentioned again, and has seemingly been abandoned in ARR. Which is unfortunate, but I guess that could be again for the technical reasons mentioned above.