The problem with WoW-type raid-focused gameplay.

[Bishop81]

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Open world content as it currently stands doesn't have enough depth to warrant adding considerations for classes,

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If open world has no meaning, and classes aren't going to be used in group content anyway, why add abilities that players will almost never use? That time would be better spent adding more abilities / actions to jobs with the understanding that they will see usage in ALL content and not just a fraction of it.

Sadly that's how it will be viewed, and while i personally love flavor skills as much as the next person i would still rather them flesh out jobs as opposed to trying to go back and retouch classes.

That needs to be fixed. Seriously, not everyone is super hard up on the challenge of raiding.

As I said earlier, I play for the atmosphere and to explore a fantasy world.

This is still dependent on how raids are designed.

Raid encounters are probably designed the same way they are in WoW.

The developers build the encounter around existing Job abilities. They remove anything if it doesn't play well with specific Jobs. Damage and mechanics are designed to be beatable by existing Job abilities and such that each Job is as close as possible performance-wise.

As you can imagine, the more Jobs (and Job variations; which are from their point of view pretty much separate Jobs), the more they have to test the raid encounters against, the more simulations they have to run.