Please stop removing Damage Over Time effects from every job, add more complexity

[Shurrikhan]

The real question to ask is what does the maintenance effect do for your gameplay? If you take Death's Design for example, it's functionally no different from all the single target 'DoT' effects that we've seen through the ages.

Kind of, but... at that point all buffs would be "functionally" DoTs.

Because Death's Design prefers its AoE form at just two targets or more, it doesn't really grant any cleave-related gameplay, though, and because it stacks up to twice its application duration, as per Warrior's Surging Tempest or Ninja's Huton (despite also being applied via a non-combo-breaking lone GCD), it doesn't significantly anchor rotation or generate any new noticeable choices or opportunity costs.

If it's just a mandatory button press every 30 seconds for the sake of 'having a DoT', that's neither interesting nor challenging, and I'd rather the hotbar space be used in more innovative ways.

Agreed.

DoTs ought to offer new decision-making. Warrior's Fracture, for instance, had that, but in a worst of ways (only worth using in rare conditions), while Monk's Fracture could use it also to enter different rotations, modulate (could speed up rotational matching by any number of GCDs, thanks to Fracture and Touch of Death) to sync macrorotation, or as a soft-CD by which to ignore positionals -- altogether an incredible amount of utility for such a seemingly simply tool because of having enough surrounding tools and purposes.