Okay, you know what, I'll give this one the benefit of the doubt. If this isn't a troll thread and you're being genuine here then I'll hope you respond to me in good faith knowing that I'm being good faith myself. That said, I very fundamentally disagree for a few reasons.

Firstly, you're coming in with the mentality that deletion is effectively always a bad thing whereas addition or expansion is a positive, which makes sense but is very much untrue in game development. Bloat is a real thing and it's quite often better to cull unnecessary features than let them balloon out of control. Everything in game development takes time and, particularly in a connected MMO like this, features can often sit in the way of other features. Take TP, for example, which mostly existed to act as a form of MP for melee AOE - that doesn't work with the ShB idea that every class should have some form of AOE they can always use. They could have reworked TP, perhaps, but it would have become something completely different and so since its original function was no longer necessary it made more sense to remove it.

Secondly, game dev just takes time, and FFXIV in particular is on a very tight, easy to predict schedule. Going back to my first point, every decision in this game regarding content has to be weighed against what they HAVE to do and what they WANT to do. Sure, they could sit down and give each class unique and engaging traits outside of combat, but that's far less important than ensuring every class is balanced and usable in combat because that's the bulk of the content for most players, and the place where balance matters most. Given that they're now focusing on Eureka like areas, expanding the quality of the story in terms of animations and fleshing out the gameplay for crafters and gatherers significantly, something else probably had to give. Whether or not they have the right priorities is... very much up for debate, but it's a tradeoff that has to happen, particularly given we get patches relatively often, all things considered.

You've kind of brushed it off but the reality is that you are ignoring the realities of game development here, which is a pretty bad idea considering they're kind of the only thing that matters. I'm sure the team would love to make more experimental and wild content and keep all those odd ideas they have but... that's not what sells and it's not what their shareholders are going to want. They've got to balance making a functioning, widely appealing MMO with their content schedule and when it comes to that things are going to get deleted.