I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they only did this because they were too far along the implementation already to reasonably drop their plans.
I can only hope Yoshida is still willing to listen to the people that just want to play FFXIV with a Blue Mage. That's all we want. FFXIV, as it is. Not a walled in playpen version where we can only run certain content from 2+ years ago.