Right now dragoon can get the job done but not well. You want superior damage and surivablity from melee range you play a monk. The fact that in order to do the damage we need to we spend half the time animation locked while having to dodge things like 100 ton swing or eruptions mechanics means you have to be very careful when you weapon skill. Power surge turns us into wet paper and we don't really have any reason to justify it. it would be one thing if you could out range aoe cleave weapon skills as a lancer but you can't. Jump being used as a perfect dodge would help for sure though. The best thing drag brings to the table right now is the burst damage from jump being an instant no tp weapon skill for killing things like the guards on ants and aoe stun/paralysis weapon skills but even then it sucks because you have to be in front to start the combo or miss an attack.
What really separates the men from the boys are the dragoons who can pull off 2 combo or 3 combos in between boss weapon skills while keeping 3 stacks of power surge. If you can pull that off you will do extremely good damage. At the end of the day its still high risk for low reward because blm, mnk can do the same much safer then drg and war dose a bit less single target about the same aoe and has the best durability of anyone one.
Which brings me to probably my number one pet peeve about the class is that since we are constantly expected to fire off ws they could at least help us out a little bit by making them from behind or better yet not positional. That would increase dragoon survival more then any ability they could give us. Since the safest place for melee is generally the back of the boss.
I mean all this could change if they designed more melee friendly bosses but mnk would probably still be on top.
I mean you might as well kill two birds with one stone with that as well and just make a mechanic where if not enough players are close enough to the boss he dose some super move and a shout that silences and dose damage players for a short duration while standing there. This would make melee useful but you would not want to stack either melee or ranged classes because there would be a weakness to both unless you used a combination of the two. Not to mention it would buff divine veil since people would actually be in range of the pld when he gets cured and get the regen effect.