The pet change accomplished one major thing: It made the act of controlling the pet not a stupid, frustrating mess. You press the button, and you quickly get the result. But there are a ton of things the pets do wrong as well, and the class is an uncoordinated, disjointed mess because of all of these reasons and more.

But all it really shows is that SMN needs a complete rework, not a partial rework. There are too many systems that are tied in to the old poison mage design instead of the new summoner design, and at this point everything remotely tied in to poison mage should probably just be gutted outright (DoTs, aetherflow, ruin scaling with dots being the big ones) in favor of pushing the demi-summon system.

All of the systems they designed for poison mage can be turned into its own class as well, it's not like it needs to be scrapped entirely, and the game can really use a DoT-focused class again. But it shouldn't be SMN.