I'm a newish player just past 50 in my first class (I just played for the free month last year and then quit, so I only have a month of play under my belt despite having a join date of a year ago). I'm a Summoner, and plan to swap to Scholar once I max out and get to know the game well enough to trust myself to do more than DPS.
I understand that change will require paying to swap out all the permanent stat points I've been allocating level by level from INT to MND. That's fine, but it makes me think that the game's ability to level every class on a single character is really sort of pointless.
Sure, you want to level the classes for your cross-class skills, and you could have a character who was level 60 in WHM, BLM, PLD and BRD -- but that character would be a hopeless gimp, because he could only have the right base stats for one of those classes.
You can feasibly level all the jobs that have the same core stat -- BLM and SUM for example, or WHM and SCH -- but does anyone at max level actually play more than one role on the same character? Is that a pipe dream?
Or, does 100,000 GC seals become a trivial price to pay once you're maxed out and running high-level dungeons all the time, so paying to swap your stats for different roles every time you switch from one job to another is not a big deal?