Suggestion for: RDM improvements

[Archwizard]

1st. VerHoly/Flare/Scorch being AoE means RDM have a proficient way of using their mana on 2 targets, moulinet doesn't enough damage at 2 targets to warrant expunging mana for it.

Moulinet on 2 targets for 5 gcds= 2000 potency
Melee combo on a single target for the same amount of gcds = 2270 potency

this means RDM in prolonged 2 target scenarios such as adds in ucob or add heavy fights like o7s can only use single target melee combo which puts them behind SMN and BLM who have dots that help with this as well as powerful AoE abilities to spike their damage.

So the solution is "increase the damage of two of our Verfinishers by 30-50% for a niche scenario" (which will most definitely come with an offset to their single-target damage) instead of increasing the damage of Moulinet by 30-40p (which at worst would come with an offset penalty to our AoE damage, most likely Impact which still has 60p of wiggle room in 2-targets)?

3rd. Paladin has a very functioning heal in clemency and doesn't pay for it as it's arguably the best tank and the role is so well balanced.

Yes, but its heal is a part of the Paladin's actual role as a tank, both for personal survivability and off-tanking, in lieu of tools like The Blackest Night, Aurora or Nascent Flash -- Arguing "PLD doesn't pay a tax on its healing!" is better matched with "WHM/SCH/AST don't pay a tax on mitigation!", not using RDM as an example. Vercure is outside of RDM's role as a caster DPS, hence its primary use as a means to pop Dualcast without a target, not a heal.
Not to mention that in both cases of Vercure and Clemency, each use of the healing effect is a penalty in itself, consuming both a GCD and resources intended for offensive skills.

If RDM wasn't doing this, explain why their melee combo is functionally and lorewise, doing magic damage. it's because they are indeed a Spellblader.

Functionally? Aight, let's start with the fact that without a melee combo at all, people would complain that it's "not a Red Mage" and "just uses the rapier as a stat stick" -- all things we already hear with the token melee combo we have (which kinda just proves my point that it would be much louder), which really makes me question where their stopping point is for a "real" Red Mage, but I digress.
The melee combo does magic damage because, as a caster, we capitalize on boosts to magic damage like the personal side of Embolden (or, back when RDM was released and it still existed, Contagion). To give us a melee ability that was purely physical like RDM has historically always had (for instance, literally the entire melee combo sans Enchantment) would be as detrimental to the job as changing SAM's Sen skills to deal Ice, Earth or Unaspected damage, on top of mitigating any future benefits that could be given to casters.
I mean, unless you want to tell me the enchantment is actually a detriment, and the job would have been better off not enchanting its weapon due to the more numerous boosts to physical damage that actual melee jobs benefit from? I'll wait.
Meanwhile, historically, a Spellblade doesn't enchant their weapons simply for the benefit of dealing bonus magic damage and exploiting elemental weaknesses, but largely for the purposes of granting buffs or debuffs via their swings that scale off their more physical stats, which is significantly more useful in FF14 given the lack of distinction between magical damage types.
Plus, y'know, having the core of their attacks be melee rather than spellcasting? Much like PLD vs WHM (or arguably SMN vs DRG, rock the dragon), it's kind of a significant difference.

Lorewise... what does that matter? There was no lore for Red Mage before Stormblood much like there was no lore for Gunbreaker before Shadowbringers or Dark Knight before Heavensward. Lore is neither justification nor tipping point for any balance decision, it's flavor text on decisions that have already been made. The devs could add a Spellblade tomorrow of non-Gyr Abanian origin and they would probably add a last-second writeup that "they always existed but you just never met one before," or "the art seemingly died with [Insert Ancient Magical Civilization Here]" like they've done for Literally. Every. Single. Job. Released.
Also, lore is a funny justification coming from the person who says Verraise should proc Verfire, balance be damned. Just sayin'.

As a caster melee hybrid, red mage is allowed to walk the line between melee dps and ranged because it's not competing with melee. Red mage doesn't need positional because it's also a spell caster and casters have cast times which are equivalent to the melee's positional as a role design choice.

Counterpoint: The people who say they want RDM to be more of a melee sound a lot like "I want to play melee but I hate positionals." SAM is already a job that uses cast times with its melee skills, so the two are already not mutually exclusive.

I'm not even sure why you think i want them to turn red mage into a melee dps. more melee doesn't mean, all melee and no spells so this argument is very strange.

You're correct that it doesn't mean "all melee and no spells" -- as we see with NIN, PLD or DRK, we can absolutely have a melee that still weaves spells, much as RDM is a caster that uses melee in bursts.
The key distinction I make with that, however, is largely due to significance and uptime.

Saying "I'd like to see more melee skills or spend more time meleeing" is, in a vacuum, harmless -- and likely will be exactly the direction the devs will take towards improving our damage in future expansions since the time factor makes for an easy tuning knob. All they need to do is add traits to reduce the CD on Manafication (ding, already done once!), add new spells with higher Mana returns (Scorch says hi), or trait to reduce the cost of melee abilities by a shred, and little by little we'll push that envelope and increase our melee uptime (and consequently our damage) by a respectable amount, even without having to add new melee attacks or increase the potency of any skills.

Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction on my part since you specifically may not actually fit the group, but in my experience the people who ask for RDM to have "more melee" or "be a real melee-hybrid" don't want 5-10 seconds of shorter delays before melee each expansion, they want the job to spend a significant percentage of the time performing successive melee combos broken up by strings of spells, or frankly have no idea what they want. The problem with that is, by the time you get to that 50% melee uptime mark, the job functionally is a melee sans positionals, that just so happens to have ranged attacks in their main combo -- and remember, nearly every melee has a rotational or oGCD attack with ranged or line damage, which they will often burst from point-blank anyway.
Why that and not the other way around? Because you have to play to the lowest common denominator, in this case the limited range opportunity of the melee attacks. You're under no compulsion to jump back 15 yards after the melee combo before you start flinging spells, nor under any penalty from bursting spells close-up aside from being squishy. We get away with backing off from the boss now because between cast times, pathetically weak auto-attacks and the sheer lack of melee uptime, we're hardly bound to melee range as-is; true "hybridization" of any significance would negate that.