TL;DR: 6.1 changes were communicated poorly. Samurai changes should have been delayed until 6.15 at the earliest or preferably 6.2 when all the large changes are planned.

After watching yesterday's official Patch Notes Reading stream and looking at the actual numerical changes, I feel I have a better understanding of the developers' intentions with the SAM changes, although I still ultimately disagree with them. In particular, there are two paradigms which should have been better communicated during the Live Letter:
  1. It is clear from the numbers that they want to distribute SAM's damage more evenly across its kit. I feel this may be the actual reason for the removal of Kaiten, as it necessarily creates a divide between high-potency and low-potency skills. This still isn't very solid reasoning, but I think it makes more sense than whatever "action bloat" was supposed to mean.
  2. They are aware of the anti-synergy with crit buffs and they plan to address this in the future by overhauling the buffs themselves. I think changing crit buffs will be good for the game overall. After all, WAR players have been struggling with this same issue for years. In my opinion, one way this can be done is to change the buffs from raw crit rate to the Critical Hit stat, which gives both crit damage and crit rate.
In my opinion, the one of the main reasons people are so upset with the 6.1 changes is that they were abrupt, uncalled for and poorly justified. Regardless, I feel the reasoning listed above is still flawed:
  1. These changes contradict most current job design. Ever since Shadowbringers and continuing into Endwalker, jobs have been tightly focused on having a burst phase every 60 or 120 seconds which lines up with raid buffs. This was even reinforced for SAM in 6.0, where we got another massive burst cooldown in the form of Namikiri.
  2. We still have the old crit buffs in 6.1. While auto-crits could be good future solution, they have been currently inserted into an incompatible version of the game. It is especially problematic that this was done so close to the release of a new ultimate, where synergy issues will likely have the biggest effect. SAM already has very little raid utility, creating problems using it alongside specific classes only makes the job more undesirable.
Ultimately, I think that now is one of the worst times to make sweeping changes to any job. It is fine for the developers to want to gradually shift FF14's overall design, but this shouldn't be done right before the release of the most challenging content in the game. If they want to test design changes on the back of SAM, this should be done during a more laid-back patch, such as 6.15 or 6.18. As a SAM main myself, I would personally prefer if this were done alongside all other jobs in 6.2.