The paring down of utility class skills and unique class elements that underperform on dps meters arise as a natural consequence of a game running long enough when the objective of the game is to perform well on a spreadsheet against an enrage timer. When a game runs long enough that it needs to balance introduction of new skills against the number of skills players already have, skill cuts are more likely going to line up with the ways people already play a class rather than reinventing the wheel.

I think this game is better than most MMOs at encouraging players to play the game for the game's sake rather than because they just need to get their weekly prize from the RNG-box but I think there's fundamental aspects of the gameplay model - role triangle, level cap being the introduction to the game loop, even aggro table/enrage timer based encounter design arguably - that complicate things and push towards a game where there's fundamentally about 3 good classes and a bunch of classes that do the same thing but worse. Content like eureka (pyros and hydatos), bozja, blue mage to some degree, even ishgard restoration help give the game more to do than selecting flavor of skill rotation to do the same numbers against the same bosses, but I kind of think we're at the point where if we would want classes to really feel different from one another, we'd need different types of content, and different ways to engage with that content, first.