Job action combos one button

[Shurrikhan]

For old abilities they haven't yet pruned? Play/Draw, Senei/Guren, Shinten/Kyuten, Tsubame-gaeshi, Jump/Mirage Dive, Sonic Break/Bow Shock and Aetherflow/Energy Drain are all buttons they could be merged. Then you have abilities like Cure and Benefit which should just upgrade into their higher level equivalents as they're completely worthless above 50. On the newer side once more, RPR's Shadow of Death is essentially Heavy Thrust—a maintenance buff removed from Dragoon four years ago.

I'm not sure why we ought focus on removing AoE | ST options before combos. At least they provide a degree of choice (though less so when the ST option is only 10% stronger than the AoE, as per Bloodletter and Rain of Death, etc.), unlike separate combo GCDs.

But yes, they could certainly be replaced by conditional skills (defaulting to the AoE if shaped AoE check would include 2+ targets, and giving the ST animation and bonus damage if there's only one) with minimal (but still existent) loss to affordance, given that XIV so rarely has any use for focus damage over greater total damage.

Agreed on all other points.
___________

They removed nearly every bloated action by now, everything we have and used in a rotational basis is useful... There's no bloat to cut anymore.

Frequency of use doesn't determine bloat. Bloat is just a matter of (in)efficiency by which a function is afforded-- i.e., whether the given implementation offers decision-making of greater value than what would likely be possible if it used up fewer buttons (and something else, of average decision-making value for that kit, took up that space). If a given implementation offers zero further actual choices than another that would use up fewer buttons, that implementation is bloated.

If I made you do a 3-step mudra to cast Glare, you'd use up 3 additional buttons, but that Glare would still just be Glare and spammed just as repeatedly. (If the idea of using 4 buttons to do a single action attracts you, note that you could accomplish the same, right now, by binding Glare to 4 different keys and hitting those in order with each cast.) Those added buttons would be used very frequently -- each 23 times per minute -- but they'd still be entirely bloat.

Press 1-2-3 is inherently more fun than pressing 1-1-1. It doesn't matter if it's the same skill repeated or a combo of skills

Then bind Glare to 3 different keys and rotate, 1-2-3, through them. And just like that, your WHM play is "inherently more fun" now.