I too agree with your sentiment.

I feel like 2.0 has been intentionally designed to be extremely simple, newbie friendly, and balanced because they had to get a game out the door in 2 years, and it had to be successful out the gate.
That's probably the main reason why this game lacks a lot of utility actions and has some mechanically boring jobs like PLD. It needed to have a strong core and to play safe.

It does however have a pretty good balance compared to most MMOs that suffer from the need to completely rebalance some classes with each patch, at the cost of being a little bland. So if that truly was the devs' intent, it was a wise decision.

Unless they somehow became lazy or want to keep playing really safe, I expect 3.0 to spice things up on that front.