A while back I made a thread about "expanding" Classes, but everyone was defensive about their raid spot.

Since no one wants Classes raid-viable, I suggest we just outright bar them from raids - i.e. You can't even zone into a raid as a Class.

In doing so, the developers can go wild on Class capabilities - since "balance" is no longer a concern; they no longer have to keep them homogeneous and boring so players can keep their raid spot in dog-eat-dog FCs.

One thing I would like to see are trainable Carbuncles.

With Chocobo Coloring they made up a system in which you can alter the chocobo's color by what you feed it. In essence it's a simplistic color "training system".

I would like the Carbuncles to be trainable such that you can alter their autonomous behavior in combat (or even out of combat).

The ideal would be some kind of rule based system with an inference engine - think Prolog. Where you "training up" certain rules that you want and the Carbuncle will obey those rules during combat, ergo, it's combat behavior is driven by those rules.

This isn't SE's first attempt at "programmable" characters. FFXII and FFXIII have programmable party members. I'm sure they can create improved versions of those.