I actually don't much care for the summon concept, although I am familiar that its really not about summoning, more about the DOTs. When I play the SMN I feel fairly weak, now I understand that a well geared BLM (at least OK) will deliver more damage than a much worse geared SMN, even against similar level's but when I evaluate the jobs and class, it seems like the SMN is actually weak.

Because of my strong preference to the DOTs over the summon, I first evaluated if the Arcanist would be a viable end game DPS unit. My first question is this:

Do you think there is a class out there that is viable in its role at end game?

In my evaluation, I noticed the SMN has 6 things going for it naturally over the ACN. The 5 spells and the damage increase to the summons. The ACN has access to all of the other classes cross class skills, least the ones it can use, and access to five more. In my evaluation, I ignored skills from THM and ARC, since the SMN can access them as well.