Quote Originally Posted by jon041065 View Post
The point is that they made rdm work in the game even if some people dislike what it lost to get it there.
That's a faulty comparison since unlike Blue Mage, Red Mage was able to maintain its identity translating to FFXIV because it had been so across the board throughout the series. With Blue Mage though, Yoshi was well aware that a lot of the focus on job identity was on how it learned spells, so the problem was to sacrifice either a huge chunk of its identity or sacrifice its place as a job like any other.

And before you say "but it can work", I made this concept for it during Heavensward that proved that Blue Mage would just be too unpopular if it lost that "open-world learning" component, as it's just far too ingrained into the identity of Blue Mage. You're more than welcome to try cooking up a concept for it, but you'd have to bear in mind that devs will always know more about their game than the players ever will at any point in time.