Can someone give me an in-depth explanation why Summoner is arguably the worst DPS?

[Romsca]

Actually Dyvid it is partially true. Black mage is a burst dps class. They switch between phases of high amounts of damage followed by a low damage phase (Fire/Ice). Their dps should be the middle between the low/high points. Summoners average dps is their actual peak on a graph. So once all their dots are up, that's their max. Of course this is single target numbers. Now, neither class should be strictly higher, they just achieve their average dps though different methods.A nice example would be in Thornmarch where we need to keep the moogles apart. Summoner is great in this fight because we can spread our dots around and keep pressure on. Black mages would need the moogles grouped together to AoE them because of how Fire 2/Blizz 2/Flare work.

Since summoners do not have infinite reserves of mana like black mage, our peak drops after a certain amount of time. Thus turning summoner into a burst class with a very long low peak. This hurts us. Fixing the amount of mana we get from piety will be the first step in balancing summoner. Not saying we couldn't use some extra potency on the dots but one step at a time.

Everyone in the last few pages have been arguing over what summoner and black mage bring to the table beyond damage. Summoner does have a traited E4E, traited Virus and battle revive. But several other classes also have access to versions of E4E and virus and with our current mana issues, using battle revive is a bad thing in top endgame content. If we had insane mana regen like black mage then yes, I would say the summoner should do the revives instead of the healers.