Did the devs explicitly mention that BLU can't raid?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Also ask yourself, why didn't they just wait until the expansion? New jobs are used to sell expansions, so why are they adding BLU in 4.5 with no expansion requirement? The answer would be the same as why they added custom deliveries in 3.5, to test the waters with a new experimental feature to expand upon it in the expansion.

Because they've consistently seen the largest drop of subs between this point and the expansion. 4.5 onwards has been a massive dry period since they have very little content to offer over an extended patch cycle. Blue Mage is simply there to help mitigate that loss, though unless the updates come fast, I suspect most people will be done with it in a week or so. As for Custom Deliveries, they did precisely the same thing: releasing Zhloe in 3.55a. It turned out to be nothing more than a glorified turn in system that saw no changes whatsoever throughout Stormblood. Ironically, one could argue Custom Deliveries replaced Beast Tribes in Stormblood given only the Namazu had any real relevance due to the lack of a relic outside Eureka.

There isn't a hidden meaning here nor is this a beta test. It's simply SE trying to keep people subscribed over the next seven months when outside of Blue Mage, all they have to offer is a 24 Man, an EX Primal and Eureka for long term content.

[Shadowshinra]

Because they've consistently seen the largest drop of subs between this point and the expansion. 4.5 onwards has been a massive dry period since they have very little content to offer over an extended patch cycle. Blue Mage is simply there to help mitigate that loss, though unless the updates come fast, I suspect most people will be done with it in a week or so. As for Custom Deliveries, they did precisely the same thing: releasing Zhloe in 3.55a. It turned out to be nothing more than a glorified turn in system that saw no changes whatsoever throughout Stormblood. Ironically, one could argue Custom Deliveries replaced Beast Tribes in Stormblood given only the Namazu had any real relevance due to the lack of a relic outside Eureka.

There isn't a hidden meaning here nor is this a beta test. It's simply SE trying to keep people subscribed over the next seven months when outside of Blue Mage, all they have to offer is a 24 Man, an EX Primal and Eureka for long term content.

Precisely, there's probably a reason why Mr Atma was on the design team for BLU and that's because of the RNG factor of learning spells, something that wasn't apart of classic BLU, you either learned the spell or you died to it. By making it RNG and having them in the 1-50 zones is to cover two things. 1 to keep people subbed during the fall off period aka Padding content and 2. To have people in the 1-50 zones. Something SE get a lot of flack for by new players who think the game is dead because there is no one around in said zones.