To me, level 50 summoner felt very coherent in shadowbringers - two dots, egi assaults and some filler. By level 80 it did seem to have rather more to do than most, but after sitting down for a bit with a training dummy it sort of clicked. I think the complaints about pet ai hold some weight, but were it to be refined slightly more it could well have been more than servicable. A lot of their issues stemmed from their decision to move when just casting more would have been significantly better. However I would be inclined to say that the knife cuts both ways on this - when comparing Living Shadow and Automaton Queen to Summoners pets the near complete lack of interaction with the former leads to them being scarcely more than glorified dots. Being able to use the egi assaults and theoretically positioning gave the user a better sense of actually being involved.

I do not feel the same way about the dots as you, but I also haven't played AION summoner so might not have always been comparing it to a more realised version of the concept. I suppose for aoe situations being able to detonate the dots to get more value would have been a nice addition, even if not strictly necessary. If we were to look at dungeon parses from shadowbringers, I would fully expect to see miasma III and Bio III up the top by damage contribution for any non-disatrous summoner.

In shadowbringers summoner had extremely good dps, even after the nerf so I'm unsure just when those comments refer to.

As long as your healer's not asleep at the wheel, there's no casual content where shielding is really necessary and to be entirely blunt there's two, maybe three hard casts per minute, the rest of the time you can pretty much run around like a headless chicken mashing gemshine and still do adequate damage.

There's a difference between making something accessible (lowering the skill floor) and removing all traces of complexity. There's no satisfaction in doing something correctly if you can't do it incorrectly: consider inner release - while the stacks might be a well-recieved QoL change, there isn't any satisfaction in getting the 5 3 fell cleaves in because you have to actively be trying to not. The same for bloodwhetting/nascent's flat potency, it used to require a modicum of forethought to get a substantial heal from it perhaps using it under inner release to really maximise the damage done to maximise healing done. Now you're pretty much full hp from any aoe, even without having to resort to chaotic cyclone/primal rend forcing a crit.

The summoner animations are nice I guess - my favourite is probably topaz rite, but I just don't think they can carry the job, particularly not in a year or so's time when everyone's very used to them.

They could be enjoying it or they could just want to watch youtube on the other monitor. I don't think you can assign meaningful motives to anecdotal strangers.