If there is a job that can do anything

[Shurrikhan]

Pretty sure that was why the combat revamp was a thing: to allow for future development. Additional resource systems like Chakra and the Oath gauge enable a foundation for more skills and abilities that can play off such systems, and newer skills like Foul and Total Eclipse fill in gaps where weak spots or down times were previously present.

I'm a little confused by this. The combat revamp added literally nothing in terms of mechanics or underlying code, unless you count Wrath in increments of 10 spent 50 at a time as inherently different from increments of 1 and spent 5 at a time. We had stance-dependent mechanics. We had job-unique resource generators and spenders. The real effect of the change was merely to siphon away already existent status effects from being visible from within a single place, shifting them into a shinier new UI. Worse, that came at the expense of intuitive UI design, seeing as it never allowed for the remaining buffs one would need to track to be visible from within that new UI. It seems, much like many of the less warranted job changes in Heavensward or Stormblood, as change for the sake of change, rather than actually finding a beneficial aim and fulfilling that goal (i.e. more intuitive buff tracking).

The problem is that major game-altering changes like these take AGES, and that's not a worry over change so much as just the general internal bureaucratic culture of a Japanese business. A good example of this is the "bowmage" joke that haunted every Bard player I knew during Heavensward, and required the combat revamp of Stormblood to be fixed.

This is precisely what I'm talking about. Just as the decision to release Deliverance, Fel Cleave, and Decimate each as separate skills/abilities rather than traits simply to fill out the "5 new skills!" reeked of sales attractions over intelligent design, so do did the new UI to me. Heck, even the "bowmage" seems more like at utter failure to test things -- or even reason them out well on paper -- than a split-second idea or something resistant to change due to internal bureaucracies; Bards really were complaining about their dealing top-line damage in high-movement fights only to plummet, relatively speaking, once others were again allowed their full uptime, and wanted either increased personal damage that would scale more as other jobs do or increased support functionality so that they could at least take better advantage of their team's opportunities in such a fight. While classically clunky even after 2 stages of patching, Wanderer's Minuet would have fit a requested direction to the job had Bard's damage outside the stance just been increased to the same extent as the other DPS's from levels 51 to 60.

There's still some mold-breaking stuff in the game though. It's just happening in baby steps, and some stuff that we might take for granted in other games like flying is pretty game-breaking when you think about it. Flying in Heavensward allowed us to move properly in a three-dimensional plane, with Diadem attempting to exploit that and failing for a handful of other reasons. What gave us flying allows for swimming, enabling a system in which we could better interact with objects in that third dimension. From swimming, we'll likely get blitzball as a testing ground for advanced actions in fully 3D environments, which would ultimately lead to aerial and aquatic combat, but we're still a long way off from all that because we're still going at baby steps.

Agreed. These steps are there, and they are vital. But it just seems hard to believe that they were ever planned ahead of time considering the lengths and overcomplications of their design. Flight is only as lackluster as is conventional for any MMO, but swimming? I can understand there not being enough content immediately imaginable to warrant its costs to have it implemented by vanilla release (as per all but a few third-person MMORPGs made in the last 20 years) and that only after two expansions did it really seem worthwhile. But as a separate zone to be loaded each time you surface or submerge, with no combat nor beneficial exploration outside of three short quests? If each was held off to give more "sky" or "sea" emphasis to Heavensward and Stormblood, respectively, shouldn't there be more, then, to flight and swimming? I certainly hope more is coming, but with the technical issues from mobs being able to make a last swat at you even when you're 20 meters off the ground to the strangely awkward physics of the water, always infinite breathe, and the lack of mobs or nodes, I'm seeing evidence only to the contrary, as it seems unlikely that what's in place can support it, and the devs seem generally unwilling to tear out existing systems for anything short of glamours or players reaching unintended areas (the whole reason we lost Shukuchi teleport and Elusive Jump and Repelling Shot actually working in three dimensions, likely to blame for some of the above-mentioned bugginess). I want Blitzball; I want aerial and aquatic combat; I just don't see how that could happen with what we've got.

It was originally deemed "impossible" for glamours to be loaded in PvP for whatever reason, to the point we were told outright in a Live Letter (I'll have to track down which exactly) than PvP glamours would never be available. It took 2 expansions for the glamour system not to shoot itself in the foot as an inventory burden, and even that solution ended up overcomplicated and similarly limited. It feels like they're taking every moment to think only of "what exactly do we need, right now?" with very little to their roadmap for what's ahead beyond a procedural schedule. "What would be cool?" "Got something?" "Okay. Let's spend a whole lot of hours thinking about everything but the system's own repercussions and needs." "And... let's get it in there." Obviously, more was done to try to make things work than I give credit for, but having seen similarly things be produced so commonly across other MMOs and seemingly with better designs both in long and short terms, it's hard to imagine it. I realize also that they've said they're moving away from that and further towards trying to create new things, and that encourages me, but it also worries me that so many projects seem likely to dead-end in less than an expansion's time (airships, submersibles) and/or see little integration (again, airships, submersibles as anything but a menu) or technical salvaging/reuse thereafter. Squadrons are about the only thing that gives me a distinct hope for progressive implementations of a concept across a common roadmap, even if I may personally dislike them.

...but I have a feeling it'd be more likely set for a distant future for the game.

The results wouldn't be possible until a distant future, but the precedents for it have to be set as soon as possible to ever get there. I'll edit some rough details in, via the hidden box, sometime tomorrow.