A lot of those classes were supposedly originated by data mining the original 1.0 client. This would be pre-Yoshida.

I remember Tanaka referencing Ultima Online a lot as inspiration way before FF14 1.0 was even in beta. So I think FF14 1.0 was intended to be more "sandboxy" whereas FFXI drew a lot f inspiration from EverQuest.

Unfortunately, Tanaka and his team were unable to bring all the systems together so all that was left was a not so great MMO with intermittent moments of greatness.

Speculation was that the Shepherd probably would've been a Disciple of Land class.