Red Mage "better"??

[Archwizard]

What about being in range for heals from your healers consistently? Plus bosses are generally kept in the middle of the arena and being in the very middle tends to give you lots of time to position with your group for upcoming mechanics. It's just good etiquette to stack with the group no matter your role.

Good etiquette, maybe, but there are a number of mechanics that encourage a loose spread (particularly so players don't run in lockstep with each other when AoE markers start being dropped underfoot), and most healers' radii and cast distances are wide enough to include the BLM standing off by their lonesome so others don't drop markers in their Ley Lines. You don't need to have your avatar inside the DRG for the rest of the fight.

The only way SE could actually make RDM stand at range is by putting a minimum range on everything but our melee combo and you can bet people would be straddling that minimum range at pretty much all times.

Which would be absolutely ridiculous, since it would arbitrarily penalize players even further in closed spaces (except instead of losing 50 potency, we lose our entire kit), and make it impossible to solo or quest.

Or maybe how the job is played should be demonstrated by skilled players and not NPCs.

I'm providing evidence of dev intent over player use. We can easily lay out dozens of examples of "skilled players figured out how to do something the devs didn't intend, so the devs patched it out."