To give an answer to the melee damage question, I already considered that and basically put INT-scaling on the Enfire buff. That Enfire buff is basically the core management mechanic of this job, where sch has aetherflow to deal with. You kinda want to keep Enfire up so you can do melee damage, but you can also sacrifice it for some healing or extra damage (flame 3).. if you drop it, you are just a single Flame cast away from putting it back up.. so it's not as strict as the timer mechanics for DPS classes, but it's something to play with and puts some depth in the job.

Also, Flame (only the first version) has a trait at lvl 16 that brings the cast time to 2.5s..