The problem with Monk isn't positionals (opinion piece)

[Silver-Strider]

MNK - If you never had a reason to minimize downtime while moving in a direction separate from any enemies or allies (so, definitely don't play certain Savage fights), 1 button.

.....and certainly has more reason to exist as a given button than does Meditation or, especially, Form Shift.

It's funny how you argue that MNK has only 1 skill that is button bloat while also saying that Mediate and Form Shift are essentially worthless and would constitute as Button Bloat. I don't see Button Bloat as an argument at all if the skills in question are functionally relevant to a class's rotation. It doesn't matter if High Jump and Mirage Dive are separate buttons because the only thing that matters is that they build up Dragon Gauge, which is a part of DRG's rotation. Anataman and SSS don't do anything for MNK and I'd even argue Riddle of Earth is also purely unnecessary now that positionals aren't a thing. They don't contribute anything to MNK in relation to its mechanics nor rotation so why do they exist? If SE's agenda of merging skills or removing them is purely to combat button bloat that are seen as fluff and don't negatively impact the class, then all 3 of those skills can easily go the way of the Dodo and begone but for some asinine reason they exist still which is absolutely baffling when you consider that their spokesperson for one of the Live Letters leading up to EW pretty much said that Anatman was just a MNK exclusive emote at this point. It's not an excuse at all.

As for how removing skills to maximize uptime is useful, it isn't but SSS isn't really that useful regardless. There is exactly 2 moments when SSS is a DPS gain. One is if a Disengage is longer than 5 seconds and the other is if we have more than 1 Chakra during a short Disengage. In the case that we have 0-1 Chakra during a short Disengage, than its better to use your GCD on anything else and use the disengage time to use Mediate instead since the 5s Slow down on SSS would effectively lose out to the 4-5 Chakras from Mediate, with the lone exception being if we missed the positional on Snap Punch and that's only a potency gain of 10.

If potency is really the only benefit to SSS than a 2nd charge to TFC/Enlightenment would accomplish the same thing without the need to jump thru hoops to do so while also not contributing to the button bloat that is SSS.