Samurai changes are unacceptable in the current iteration

[Beddict]

That's what I've been told, too - that the Kaiten removal has something to do with making future changes easier.

This is correct. Yoshi-P did a read through of the Patch Notes when the servers were down for maintenance and he spent some time talking about SAM. You can find the translation here with a followup post immediately below it here. The two big standouts I found from the read through were the following statements:

and on Kaiten getting removed we did that because we want to do away having to be restricted by that move

However, as for opinions, Of course we do and indeed read those properly, including those that think it's not right to over standardise jobs or comments like "you overdo yourself when it comes to our only trait or the optimization elements we have". We do indeed want to push it for as much as we could, and we are very well aware of people who understand this, as well as people who are already used to what they have now and people who told us not to do anything unnecessary. We really get that but in order for the expansion to continue and for each jobs to continue getting new actions, and whenever we think of trying to maintain the individual characteristics of each job, we found out that this "optimization" is quite tied and connected to the irregular element that was created in the past, and if we don't work to address this we can no longer build upon the existing elements and improve things further, and it'll land us in a situation where we can no longer steer ourselves forward.

So, Yoshi-P feels that Kaiten is an ability that is heavily restricting the design space for SAM and will make it difficult to develop the Job further in the future. Which sure, maybe there's some merit to that, I'm not a SAM main and can't be assed to do a deep dive into the Job to find out. However, I can clearly see that ripping out a part of a Job's kit and telling players "it's for the future" is fucking stupid because now there's a hole in the Job and a bunch of pissed off players. This is the kinda shit that should've come in 7.0 with the new abilities he's telling players to look forward to. Gutting the Job from 6.1 to 7.0 while offering nothing in return is such a bad idea, and it's embarrassing that a dev team that brags about "playing the game" and "listening to players" can fuck up so badly.