Arcanist and Summoner: a possible solution

[5trange]

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I actually joined FFXIV as my very first MMO during Eden's Verse and the reason I joined the game in the first place was because I fell in love with Momo Sama's Scholar videos from Stormblood — little did I know at the time the game had changed A LOT and the Job I had grown to love had been butchered. The Summoner I'm familiar with is thus from Shadowbringers. Still, I'm the kind of guy who will research the story of patch notes and read/listen to old guides of a Job he likes so even though I wouldn't say I know the Job 100%, I have pretty precise info from ARR to EW.
I agree with you that they shouldn't have outright abandoned the old framework of Summoner, but when I started this topic I basically assumed that with Endwalker SE had meant to put an end forever to that kind of thing. I'll be honest with you: the chance of them ever separating ACN and SMN is basically nonexistent but, for some reason, the chance of them going back to a pet+DoT+Demi Summoner sadly feels even more impossible — thus my proposal to at least salvage the old kit as a separate entity instead of discarding it.

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As I said, I know how ShB Summoner worked and I myself stated that the EW Summoner has no build-up, no decision-making and no flexibility. My point was mostly directed towards those who say "oh, just bring Elemental Mastery down to the low levels" without realizing that this wouldn't change anything because the GCD frame of the Summoner rotation between Bahamut and Phoenix would still only allow for Ruin III + Ruin IV as fillers. As you said very well, the good part about ShB Summoner "filler phase" was to actually build and juggle resources for the Demi-Summon phases so even as a filler it had a deeper purpose. The point is: how do we give the new Summoner some decision making — besides solving its many other problems?
I feel like Ibbers' idea of attaching a passive effect to the Primal Summons could be an interesting start. If we imagine it like an Everlasting Flight kinda thing (i.e. party-wide effect), it could be for example:
• Titan, when summoned, provides a party-wide damage reduction;
• Garuda, when summoned, provides a party-wide haste buff (like old Fey Wind from Selene);
• Ifrit, when summoned, provides uh... a low dmg. buff? Idk man...
These are just (very bad) examples but they serve the purpose of making the act of pushing a "Summon" button have more consequences than just 3 flashy bursts lasting 2 seconds.