Thought about RDM's utility

[Duelle]

One, which I assume falls closer to dev intent as seen with the SMN, is that giving a DPS role access to a rez tool is useful for if the healer(s) fall in battle. The other, from a higher-end player perspective, is that the RDM's comparable access to raising makes them first priority to perform raises on the party, since their MP is otherwise expendable compared to a healer's own and they waste fewer GCDs on each one.

While you're not wrong in your assertions, you seem to be downplaying the effect battle rezzes have on the meta and how they affect perception of the jobs involved. The devs are treating battle rezzes in a way that seems to be detrimental to RDM's (and to a lesser extent, SMN) place in the meta, and this is exacerbated by the knowledge that RDM can bypass Verraise's long cast time because of how Dualcast was implemented.

Now combine this with the thread about RDM not being wanted in PF groups because of their lower DPS (which, again, is presumably thanks to Verraise), and you can probably see my reasoning. Killing the rezbot meme means that when RDMs ask for things (like higher DPS output so that they don't get excluded from PF groups), the naysayers have one less thing to bring up (they'd likely fall back to Vercure and the job's lack of "complex" mechanics, which are harder to quantify and thus easier to ignore). And to do so you need to fundamentally change how raises are handled by DPS classes.

A) it would be the only rez-accessing job restricted to a cooldown

As I'm very much in favor of changing stuff across the board, this part is a non-factor. In situations like this, you want the affected roster to all play by the same rules instead of making unnecessary exceptions.

B) that's a drastic change to the RDM status quo.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

If the RDM is expected by their raid team to have expendable raises for DPS and by the devs to have emergency raises for priority targets, being able to keep an extra raise in their back pocket for a rainy day allows the caster to accomplish both goals, so long as they remain tactical in their deployment.

Battle rezzes are generally meant to try to prevent a wipe by bringing back someone that is crucial to raid survival. It's supposed to be a second chance with a big "now don't screw up again" attached to it. Having "disposable raises" undermines that entirely.

Non-sequitur:

Unrelated note, I disagree highly with your signature. RDM has never been a melee-centric or melee-heavy job, and in fact usually spends more time casting in the entries for which it is available; the fact that it has better melee equipment or physical stats in older entries is, for the most part, consolation for limiting their access to stronger spells.

I never said RDM was melee-centric. What I did say is that RDM is a combination of sword and spell, and representing that combination is very important. The console FFs kept the three aspects of the job segregated from each other (largely because of turn-based combat), but a modern MMO doesn't have that limit. There's several mechanics that could be used to help represent that combination of trades that the were not possible in the turn-based games.

The Red Mage has only ever been about combining White and Black magic into something more, with swordplay being largely vestigial; in fact the "iconic" use of a rapier is actually quite recent in series history, around FF11 I think.

There was no combining of anything in the older games. RDM was used as a stand-in for whatever it was you were missing (hence why there are FF1 runs where RDM is the healer since the group has no white mage). As I said above, by design the three aspects of RDM (sword, white magic, black magic) had no interaction with each other, so it was a matter of weaker cures being better than having no cures at all.

Funnily enough, FFXI was the game that tried having RDM combine their trades with Enspells (which allowed auto-attacks to deal additional elemental damage) and Phalanx (which reduced damage taken and stacked with Protect). This was a step in the right direction towards (IMO) the natural evolution of a hybrid like RDM.

Despite the fact that RDM in FFXI was boned by several factors, that one step taken with Enspells and Phalanx is very significant and something that should be built upon.

By comparison, it's been a "turret" as long as it has had Dualcast, introduced in FF5.

Dualcast as a RDM job command was pretty much exclusive to FF5 before the offshoots, and the only reason that job command exists was because Sakaguchi & Co needed a gimmick to get players to level and master RDM (considering Dualcast + Black Magic or Summons was a popular setup, it was a strong gimmick but one that RDM benefited the least from).

For a job focused on combining sword and sorcery, you may mean Rune Fencer, Spellblade or Mystic Knight.

This isn't much of an argument, as the combination that I speak of is more than just enchanting your sword and whacking away (though it is a single step in the right direction). Beyond melee strikes with particle effects, your average hybrid also has mechanics that combine magic and melee: melee skills weakening the target to magic spells, magic spells weakening the enemy to melee skills, melee skills making a follow-up spell instant (bonus if the player has to decide to use that instant cast for a damaging spell or a healing spell), melee skills following a spell having a secondary effect. This all goes well beyond the scope of Mystic Knight/Rune Fencer's concept (though as FFXI has proven, the concept does have directions in which it can grow).

Compare the aforementioned gameplay and mechanics to one where RDM has to stand in one spot spamming magic for 18 GCDs (assuming no Verfire/Verstone procs) before wasting a gap closer to use 3 melee skills + an instant nuke before wasting a gap opener and going back to spamming spells. Where the melee combo feels tacked on and looks like it was almost grudgingly put in because the job would otherwise be as insulting as Revelation Online's Swordmage.

oversused "mage" argument

Was wondering where that would rear its ugly head.