Remove two Summoner butons?

[Renathras]

Except for Ruin III, the opposite phase's buttons are dead half the time (Gemshine and Precious Brilliance are dead in trances, and Tri-Disaster is dead during summons. Ruin III is active during summon, but there's little reason to use it then.

Other than "Herp derp, SMN is already too simple!", is there any reason for Ruin 1/2/3 and Outburst/Tri-Disaster not to just be Gemshine and Precious Brilliance's base form? Like, you're never going to cast Ruin 3 if Titan, Garuda, or Ifrit are out. It's a DPS loss in all cases, and in Titan and Garuda, a mobility loss as well. The low levels are even just <Color> Ruin anyway. And the same argument holds for Outburst. Even moreso than this, in Trances, Ruin 1/2/3 and Outburst/Tri-Disaster DO convert to the spam attack of Bahamut/Phoenix phases anyway, during which Gemshine/Precious Brilliance, as you note, do absolutely nothing instead.

It'd make far more sense to just make the base form of the Gemshine button Ruin.

I think that's what you're saying here, and if so, I completely agree.

Not because I think SMN needs to be simplier, but because I think it's honestly just logical to do that.

EDIT:

I see where OP is coming from and I agree. To those who say "there's nothing more to simplify", yes there is.
Not only can we merge gemshine/brilliance with ruin iii/tridisaster, but we can also merge energy drain/energy siphon with ruin iv.
Note that energy drain/fester and energy siphon/painflare are literally the same skills but 1 target or 2+ so there's very little point to actually separate them.

SMN is such a shallow job that they have to make up buttons to barely fill up 1 XHB. It's a literal button bloat.

The odd thing about this to me is they just made Ruin 4 AOE to begin with, so that you don't have a "single target vs AOE target" version of it. But they did for the others. And honestly, Aetherflow is the one mechanic I really DID hope they'd drop from SMN. It make some sense for SCH, but SMN has long since stopped using the mechanic, so it seems just weird to still have it instead of just having some oGCDs with charges instead. If we had Ruin 4 as a 60 sec CD button and Energy Drain/Fester as a single oGCD button with 3 charges and a 20 sec refresh, it would achieve the same result without the weird "we have it just to have it" 2 charge Aetherflow thing. It would need to share this with the AOE version, but other Jobs already do this, like WAR with Upheaval/Orogeny, and I think BRD has a single target/AOE target oGCD that share a CD, too. Bloodletter/Rain of Death, maybe?

I'm not saying just make everything AOE (like Ruin 4), but I feel like having two 3 charge buttons (Fester and Painflare) and dumping the Aetherflow mechanic entirely would just make more sense. Instead of pushing the one button to generate a Ruin 4 and then burning the two stacks, you could pool 3 stacks to use during 1 minute burst and Ruin 4 would be a 60 sec CD you'd use that way instead.

That is, this isn't about "make it even easier", as the Aetherflow charges don't add ANY complexity over just having a three charge button, and a three charge button would actually be more complex since you'd have options to either pool 3 charges or burn 1/2 for things like bosses going untargetable - this would actually be a higher skill ceiling than what we have now, if only slightly so - and more about "why the hell does SMN even still HAVE an Aetherflow gauge?" Decoupling it from Ruin 4 could make that "easier", but right now, you just use it on CD anyway, so that's not really a change, and it would punish people for sitting on Ruin 4 instead of keeping the CD rolling, so that would, again, actually be a higher skill ceiling as well.