But I do agree they designed themselves into a corner with the class system.

It's way too specific and the current jobs are too similar to the base class. They did a decent job with Arcanist going into Scholar, but for a class like Gladiator, it makes it unnecessarily complicated to turn it into a job that isn't a tank.
IMO they should move a lot of the class abilities and traits to jobs and abandon the whole "1 job skill every 5 levels" template. That way the classes are more generic and the jobs more specific.