I think SE needs to seriously look at what other MMORPGs are doing and adopt some of their balance habits. Something several MMOs have done that has worked wonderfully for class balance is give classes exclusive raid buffs. This way, an archer can do less dps, but if it can give your entire party an accuracy or attack power aura, then it would be worth taking one anyways. Or if Marauder gave a str/vit buff to everyone, and GLA gave the entire party like 5% damage reduction, etc. As of now, the only thing they have even close to this outside of CJR protect is a couple WS effects which seem completely underwhelming, and aren't personal buffs.

This would enable them to make certain classes damage output slightly lower than others while giving them the utility of buffing the others with no sacrifice to the group's total dps. If there is no utility outside of ranged/melee, and everyone is balanced to do similar dps, parses will always pick out one that is like .5 avg dps higher and people will ask for only those people because this is what FFXI trained people to do. Classes need more utility. A lot more. If they don't do it with jobs, then this game will suffer the same fate FFXI did. BLM/RNG only.