The news that Greased Lightning is essentially going away makes me even less interested in returning to current Monk, lol

I want to be hopeful. Because so many of the new tools SE gave us in ShB were based around maintaining GL, this change alone is probably the first time the dev team has forced themselves to take a hard look at the entire toolkit of the job, and they might actually do some interesting things with it. Unfortunately, my expectations at this point are pretty much rock bottom.

Ideally, this would be the perfect opportunity to finally and utterly remove the elemental stances from the game and replace them with OGCDs we've lost over the years. In practice, I think what we can expect is an extreme streamlining of the job, which might make it "feel" better to play at the cost of some of its identity. I've started playing Machinist more, and I have a blast with it, but I've heard people with far more experience with the job from its introduction complain that the job's identity took a hit with ShB, making it almost too simple and straightforward to play.

My worry is that they go ham in de-emphasizing positionals in order to cater to players that bounced off the job years ago and never came back to it. One of my favorite parts of the current monk "feel" is the need to be mobile in order to get the best performance out of every strike. Even though I've had fun with other jobs in the game, no melee DPS had that same "dance" next to the mob, and it would be disappointing to see it go away for me.