
Originally Posted by
Shippuu
The latest bit of evidence is pretty much a final nail in the coffin. It doesn't get much closer to full on confirmation than data files validating it.
The only connection that's any kind of "conspiracy theory" level is the Sam Raimi director connection, but it's also honestly a bit too weird to not be a coincidence. The rest of the evidence is absolutely sound however.
We know straight up that Samurai was in contention for 3.0's Tank, but lost out (at the last minute too) to Dark Knight for it's thematic matching to 3.0's setting and the reluctance to release another eastern themed job so close to ninja. So we already know it was a job that was on the top of their list to add.
Yoshida and team certainly cave to pressure from the players/fans when it comes to adding jobs considering so far every job except Astrologian has been ones widely requested and topping player polls from 1.0 (SMN, NIN, MCH, etc.)
Then the job samurai was mentioned directly by name by Yoshida's self insert during the Rising event in 2015 as potentially a new job they were going to work on, in the very same statement he name dropped Red Mage.
After that, we get an in-game lore confirmation that samurai specifically at least exist by name as a thing. Listed alongside shinobi (ninja) as something from Doma, which considering the vast majority of surviving Domans (or perhaps all of them) are now in Eorzea, it sets the perfect excuse for us to be able to learn said job, since those who would be able to teach it are now in Eorzea.
Finally, we have the datamined files, which is not just some random file with the word "sam" in it, but specifically multiple files for cutscene placeholders for job story quests, alongside other job files named in exactly the same format including rdm.
All these things combined with an odd but still valid connection to the t-shirt tease Yoshida wore, on top of his comments and deflecting when it comes to acknowledging Samurai questions, and actually shooting down other popular theories, it's pretty cut and dry at this point.
You say SAM fans are on a whole other level when it comes to hints about their job coming to the game, but clearly you haven't been paying attention to these threads because people saying "They said the color blue! BLUE MAGE CONFIRMED" is actually straight up the biggest reach. Or even the dancer camp, of which there is virtually zero hard evidence of Dancer even being considered for addition ever in this game. The devs have not once even acknowledged Dancer as a potential job.