You're not wrong, but to be clear, when I say talents I don't mean anything like WoW's systems. WoW's talents were completely game-changing and had massive impacts on balance - what I'm contemplating is more along the lines of "Do you want X AOE to be circle or cone?" - same damage, same kenki generation - just pick the AOE type you like. Or, even for the ones that do alter gameplay, like the example with Seigan, it's still based on successfully mitigating damage with Third Eye and gaining a damage output by doing so, the question is if you want that damage to ultimately come passively from Shinten spam, or from Seigan, Seigan requiring an additional button to press.
If not careful, it could absolutely disrupt balance, but at this point it seems worth consideration considering how often and thoroughly they've been undermining job design that people enjoy(ed). I'm generally very tentative when it comes to messing with a formula that is known to work well, but the changes they've been making don't work well - virtually every job if not literally every job is unhappy with various changes they've received, and usually because the changes move ever toward job homogenization. I agree that every job should have a unique identity, but that's what we've been losing. With talents perhaps we could keep job identity for the more complex choices and leave the homogenization as a matter of choice that newbies can opt into to make things easier while veterans who want the full experience of the job can keep it.
I'm not advocating, or even entertaining the idea of letting tanks be dps or dps be tanks or healers to be dps or whatnot, just some minor tweaks that could either make jobs more enjoyable based on player preference without affecting balance, or make the jobs a little easier at the cost of a little performance.
The three main goals would be entwined: 1) let players tailor their kits to their liking while also 2) introducing ways to simplify kits for those who want simpler kits, albeit at a cost to performance, which 3) prevents the need for SE to simplify kits across the board like they've been doing, sparing those of us who don't want simplification.