Why can't we have jobs with this level of depth and customization in FFXIV?

[Fendred]

Indeed. And unlike FFXI and WoW, FFXIV doesn't have 10(ish) years of development (yet. Here's hoping it does).

"Oh, but they should have learned from the past" You think they haven't? They have more access to what people do in the background of a game than any player ever will. All the "I think"s and "but all my friends" are not really good indicators of what the entire playerbase is doing.

The game is moving forward. What we have right now is the basic framework for the future, but it is not what the game will look like even one year from now (keeping in mind that expansions are often used as an opportunity to make sweeping changes to mechanics and classes).

They set up the game based on a lot of things that a western MMORPG developer trying to make a better MMORPG would probably avoid if not for how corporate money has influenced developers in the west.

Why was there exactly one tank, one healer, and two DPS positions in the party setup? Because they had 2 tank, 2 healer, and 4 DPS roles. They made an assumption that is plainly and obviously false to anyone who has been into MMORPGs in the west for a long time: That players will evenly distribute themselves throughout the available jobs when one or more jobs possess a clear DPS advantage. That's been around since WoW's release in 2004. I'd even venture the cross-server party match making system (duty finder), which was introduced in WoW as a last resort to solve the queue problem from the class imbalance, was simply put in because of its popularity in other games as opposed to why WoW's development team placed it in their game.

More recently, Yoshida was surprised to find people socially networking in order to overcome the challenge that hunts present. His accident created something that has the seeds of something good and genuine: Obstacles that can only be overcome by putting aside everyone's differences in order to overcome the challenge.

What I'm trying to say is, they don't know what necessarily will make an MMORPG in today's market successful and they've plainly stated that Japan does not have many MMORPG developers. They have no point of reference like we do from years of success and failures. Instead, the game is an experiment in putting different concepts together and seeing what happens.