So... 2 Jobs one Class?

[Jacost]

I do remember them saying before 2.0 that all classes would have more than one job, and that the new class arcanist would be the beginning.

They probably changed their minds when they saw how much of a headache balancing the two was. That said, I think they've said that classes won't receive any skills at all post-50, and it's all job skills from that point on. If that's the case, then I can see that by the time the level cap hits 75 in 4.0 (that's just a guess), jobs with the same base class will only have about half or less of a shared movepool, which makes it much easier. Heck, they say that a lot of new skills are coming in 3.0, so maybe it'll happen sooner than that.

[Garlyle]

I don't believe they've said flat out that they will get rid of it.

However, they've made it pretty clear at this point that they're not much of a fan of it at this point. And as nifty as split classes are, I can also see it being something that can drag down a lot of creativity and variety in jobs if they adhered to it.

[Kotemon]

I doubt it, like others said Summoner and Scholar was a good example. Even the base class had int boosts and if you wanted to be a healer you had to change everything into mind and vice versa. In-fact it looks like it was to be the base class for Summoner instead. However on a side note scholar sounds like it sould have been the base class for Astrologian or vice versa. In my opinion the Sch/Smn thing would have been fixed if they had a skill that swapped mind and int stats directly. Then you could go full int for summoner then activate that shared ability to swap int totals with mind when you change to Sch and vise-versa. For example; 515 int and 375 Mnd would become; 375 int 515 Mnd. Sch would have all the healing effect boosts and summoner would have all the mage DD boosts. While Arcanist would be have the shared middle of the road stats and abilities. That would make the current setup more functional to change between the two. Otherwise it would have been more of a base class for red mage with that 50/50 stat split.

[Averax]

SMN and SCH reminds me of two people who are super-glued together, and have to try to achieve things despite being glued together..

[aerialrave]

They messed up big time with SMN/SCH. These are my least favorite combat classes and I've been putting off leveling them.

At first look, it seems like it would be a shame to do away with a fork/tree system that branches out, because it would seem like you miss out on opportunities of having similar but different jobs with a base class to tie them together.
But in reality when you think about it, you can just have similar jobs exist without having to tie them together with a base class at all, and just keep them completely separate. There would be nothing wrong with that.

An example would be the upcoming Machinist. At first glance It would make sense to perhaps tie it together with possible future classes such as Musketeer and Corsair. But really if you had all 3 of those as completely seperate jobs without anything tying them together no matter how similar they are... I don't see anything wrong with that at all. Some people might complain that it would be useless to have them exist if they're too similar, but I don't think I would actually mind it.