casters: what am I missing

[Lavieh]

Gotta respectfully disagree about a low skill ceiling on SMN, or that BLM's skill ceiling is much higher.

SMN's floor would be 1-2-3 Dots, 3x Festers, DWT -> Deathflare. It is pretty simple and the numbers produced from following such a simple pattern are really pretty decent. There is definitely a lot of things you can do to optimize your SMN rotation such as proper AT stack management, not clipping dots, attacking, using the right pet ect. But reaching the base potential of SMN is stupidly easy and optimizing your decisions doesn't really make a huge difference as opposed to other classes. That is what I meant by low ceiling. Yes there is a lot of tweaking you can do to increase your DPS but the end result isn't far off from that of a decent SMN.

I may also be off with the skill ceiling of BLM. I think that the ceiling comes into to play when you have to handle mechanics though and learning how to DPS through them.

SMN is about what you can do to the enemies, BLM is about what the enemies do to you.

This is easily the biggest thing that distinguishes the two classes. You can always control what you do to an enemy but it is hard to control what the enemy can do to you (though possible). I would argue that SMN is among the easiest of classes to play decently (Given no personal preference, like not being good at watching dot timers ect).