Arcanist and Summoner: a possible solution

[Dahlinea]

1) Extremely rigid and inflexible "rotation" (lol).
Some people have recently advocated to bring the Elemental Mastery Trait to lower levels, but I believe it doesn't really solve the problem of EW Summoner and actually ends up making it more apparent much earlier while leveling. The issue with lvl. 90 SMN currently is that the rotation is 100% inflexible since you only have 2 filler spell slots (Ruin III + Ruin IV) while the rest is literally "hardcoded", which makes delaying, holding or anticipating anything feel really terrible. If you bring Elemental Mastery to, say, the 50-60 range, you end up locking your rotation even earlier — at lvl. 80, as soon as you unlock Phoenix. The problem is that, with SMN as it currently is, you gradually move from having infinite segments of filler "standard" Ruin spam to zero segments of it at lvl. cap.
The only positive aspect of bringing this Trait at around 50-60 is to make SMN "slightly more enjoyable" at lower levels but it does not offer any chance of improving the Job as you'll still end up with auto-pilot 2 button spam rotation. I feel like what's needed is some breathing room, so you have more control of WHEN to use stuff (provided you don't lose uses in the fight) and you have room to actually add complexity and not merely another recolor of Ruin.

The flexibility of old SMN was mainly on how you managed the Ruin spells in the 'preparation phase' for Bahamut/Phoenix. Before we had 3 types of Ruin spells: Ruin III (our main spell with cast time), Ruin II (insta cast but lower potency, used for movement 'oh shit' moments) and Ruin IV (upgraded from Ruin II with stacks of Further Ruin; the prefered one for movement). The main SMN game during the preparation phase was to cast as much Ruin III as possible and bank enough Further Ruin stacks from Egi-Assaults to spend during Bahamut which didn't had an exclusive spell for his phase like Phoenix have.
The Ruin spells management gave SMN some decision making during fights because you would have a surplus of Further Ruin stacks that you had to use or would be a dps loss. On the other hand, using a lot of it would hurt our burst phase during Bahamut.
So you had 4 charges of Egi-assaults that granted Further Ruin stacks which in turn had to be managed efficiently to serve both 'preparation phase' and Bahamut phase optimally. We also had more Aetherflow stacks before because Energy Drain was 30 seconds CD, which gave us more oGCDs to press.

Current SMN doesn't have nowhere near this level of flexibility. Right now, SMN is just "pick a summon to go with and use the obligatory two spells till Bahamut/Phoenix timer is up". There's no more 'preparation phase', it's just 'waiting phase' now and one pretty shallow at it.