How much Dev work would it be..

[Enkidoh]

Shields being independent of a weapon is a legacy of FFXIV version 1.0, where shield use was actually a seperate sub-class called Sentinel (SEN for short), thus you could equip a shield to another class and it would allow you to use that shield (specifically, THM and CNJ could also equip shields, although only GLA had access to SEN's abilities). SEN was eventually scrapped as a specific class, shield use becoming classless, and it's abilities rolled into GLA natively (as long as you equipped a shield), and THM and CNJ (and their Job upgrades that were added to 1.0 in a patch) retained their ability to equip certain shields, and this continues into ARR into the present day.

If SE ever were interested in just making shields a part of GLA/PLD's weapon kit by default, I think they would have made it so from ARR's begininng, so as it stands, I doubt very much SE will ever change this, as it would serve little benefit for a whole lot of potential trouble.

[Bright-Flower]

Shields being independent of a weapon is a legacy of FFXIV version 1.0, where shield use was actually a seperate sub-class called Sentinel (SEN for short), thus you could equip a shield to another class and it would allow you to use that shield (specifically, THM and CNJ could also equip shields, although only GLA had access to SEN's abilities). SEN was eventually scrapped as a specific class, shield use becoming classless, and it's abilities rolled into GLA natively (as long as you equipped a shield), and THM and CNJ (and their Job upgrades that were added to 1.0 in a patch) retained their ability to equip certain shields, and this continues into ARR into the present day.

If SE ever were interested in just making shields a part of GLA/PLD's weapon kit by default, I think they would have made it so from ARR's begininng, so as it stands, I doubt very much SE will ever change this, as it would serve little benefit for a whole lot of potential trouble.

Yeah. If Paladin/Gladiator was added to the game post 2.0 I suspect that the sword and shield would be together as one item. But with the way things were inherited from 1.0 it just wouldn't be worth the effort. They would have to go through all the effort of merging them, for ultimately no real gain. The current system doesn't cause problems really. And changing it would cause an outcry of paladins having cosmetic flexibility taken away, and the ability to more easily mix/match for stats.

So even if on the code side of things it turned out to be super easy to merge pld swords/shields, the backlash they would get on top of no substantial benefit just makes it unlikely to ever happen.