Should they remove positionals at this point?

[Shurrikhan]

It is objectively being toned down every patch where balance changes happen for melee DPS. That's an objective fact.

True, but it's also devoid of context. The Monk changes were given literally as "band-aid" changes to be replaced with 5.0. The Dragoon positional changes before that were in line with the stated goal -- reduced skill-gap. Neither shows a sole aim to phase out the mechanic, else we wouldn't have certain jobs still just as, if not more, affected by frustrating positioning than they were in Heavensward.

More importantly, though, think about how much patch content this expansion has been made to fix unintended consequences of some other change. The ability of melee to manage their positionals were hit incredibly hard with the SB changes. Compensation should have been due at the start of SB, but, unsurprisingly, they've not noticed the effects of losing flexibly timed non-positional skills until

Each melee initially had far more skills that had no positional requirements. On Monk and Ninja, especially, one could slip in an extra cross-class skill into the rotation at faint TP inefficiency or negligible DPS cos or faintly delay one of their DoTs for until a spin would occur, utterly removing the positional risk. I would actually posit that positionals were easier to manage in Heavensward than even now, after all the buffs diminishing them, just due to that. Its just that we had actual near-constant access to means to ignore positionals rather than a 90-second cooldown and each positional being worth less.

The reductions we have now are necessary just to reach the same performance over a positionally frustrating piece of content that we had before. Note that the one job that has seen no reductions to its positional costs (60 potency per missed positional in terms of Shinten, higher if in terms of Guren or Seigan or an effective Gyoten), is also the one with the most control over its timings of position-less skills. Everyone else lost their control, and was compensated. Samurai retains that control, and was not compensated.

And historically, the trend of positionals is far from uniform. The positional bonus attached to Demolish was originally nonexistant, and then irregularly small making the skill most "okay", after Fracture, later-ID, and ToD, to use from the wrong position. In ARR, Ninja scarcely even had positionals. The portion of dictated positions, i.e. the prevalence of position-dependent gameplay, has only increased over time.