I've been maining monk since late in Heavensward when I leveled it to get mantra for ninja and realized I enjoyed this job a lot more than I had expected I would... and I have to say that this expansion was overall pretty good for monk changes/additions. But like the original poster, I do have my own concerns too, mostly regarding the opener.

I love four point fury. This is what monk has needed for quite a while to make our AOE feel complete. I love the added speed from greased lightning 4, and and currently hopeful that the issue with low skill speed on available gear will be fixed as the expansion goes on. Enlightenment, again, is something we've been asking for since Heavensward, and we finally got some of our more useless skills like One Ilm Punch and Purification removed.

My main issues now are that while Anatman and and Six Sided Star are good for helping with greased lightning, the loss of wind tackle really make the opener slower, and the increased cool down on perfect balance from 60 seconds to 120 means that we've punished a lot more severely if for any reason we do lose greased lighting (whereas before we could rely on that or on wind tackle to get things going again) and now with four stacks of greased lighting, the punishment feels that much more severe.

Problem feels like they keep slapping solutions on us for greased lightning when really the way that buff acts is the problem, so while other jobs get flashy new moves or can stack their strongest skills to use again or get skills that repeat their strongest moves (I'm thinking of samurai and black mage) we get more skills to maintain our job buff. The simplest solutions are to copy what works for other jobs. Dragoon just has to hit a button to refresh blood of the dragon and the buff lasts longer than greased lighting when added, and can immediately be extended to nearly twice our duration. Black mage last expansion has been able to keep up their buffs by simply hitting transpose every few seconds, yet we can't maintain our by using form shift. Fix the way greased lighting is gained and maintained, and the job becomes that much easier to build on.