Exactly this. Roll the changes out when they are good and ready, during a new xpac release, after preparing the community. If he had said "hey, we know you like Kaiten for a variety of reasons but due to how the ability worked it was hard for us to expand on the job for future expansions, so we are removing it but in return SAM is getting X, Y and Z" then yeah, people would have been upset at the removal of Kaiten but with the upfront nature of the declaration I think people would have been willing to give Yoshi P. and his team the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the change would have been shit, maybe it would be ok, maybe it would have been awesome, but it for sure wouldn't have been done suddenly in the middle of an xpac cycle right before a major new end-game content release when player job satisfaction and job performance were both high.
I really just cannot fathom why they thought this change was a good one to do at this time. Putting aside my personal feelings for Kaiten I'm fine with changes to a job for the better long-term health of the game but not only was it implemented in the worst possible way but the reasoning that underlies it now just feels lazy. Further exacerbating this issue is that we received no less than three other reasons behind the removal of Kaiten, all of which the community put in the grave within 24 hours. It just felt insincere to me. Like yeah, it's button bloat but you could remove so many other things and in fact we've been asking for that ever since Shoha 2 was introduced. Oh but it's not "button bloat" anymore it's "action bloat" only SAM has less APM now in EW than it did at the end of ShB and removing Kaiten just lowers our overall APM by 1 so nothing worthwhile is accomplished. Ah but yes, the damage variance, addressing spike damage, very big problem you see, only there are way better ways to accomplish this that don't involve gutting SAM and turning it into a Shinten-bot. Oh but really it's that Kaiten is a difficult skill to "design around" so we're just going to remove it instead of coming up with a more elegant solution that preserves the feel and gameplay. Also we're going to remove it with not even a week's-worth of warning in the middle of an xpac right before Ultimate is released while simultaneously destroying the synergy between SAM and half the other DPS in-game.
So whereas before I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt *now* I'm wondering why the hell did they give us this ridiculous song and dance about "action bloat" and "button bloat" and "damage variance" only to say "ok, really, Kaiten is just a bitch to design around" at the end of it all? My trust is gone now, at least from a job balancing perspective. This could have been handled so much better, timed so much more appropriately but it wasn't and for what purpose? It is such a tone-deaf move, so uncalled for, that thousands upon thousands of paying subscribers are now feeling unease about the state of job balancing in this game.