Have you ever played anything besides XI if you have you would know there are 100's of ways to make classes feel different w/o an elemental wheel.
there are 100s of ways to make classes feel different, sure. But there's nothing wrong with an elemental wheel. You're proposing to take a system that's not broken and stomp all over it because you personally don't like it, not because it's a bad system.

Hundreds of games have had elemental systems and worked just fine and dandy. Elements are not a defective concept.