One of my friends who mained mch in... stormblood? Or maybe hw. I don't remember. Point is, he mained it before it was heavily simplified. He quit the game around sb, and he was watching me stream it for him. When I told him that I had mch leveled up, he got really excited so I switched to it and showed him the gameplay (this was in shb) and he kind of had a fit. He went on about how the job used to require a lot of thought and now it was just "head empty, 123 gauge-spender."

Basically, I don't think the devs hate mch. I think mch was simply an early victim of streamlining gone wrong. I also think it lacks a purpose within the community's expectations. Other rangedphys jobs bring some element of a damage boost to the table, but not mch. No, mch gets to be a selfish dps job. But within the realm of selfish dps jobs, mch lags behind all of them. Even if you disregard the parser minmaxing, on a level of feeling alone it just sucks to feel like your job kind of lacks a viable purpose. So even if the devs don't necessarily hate the job, they have created a situation where lots of its players are deeply unsatisfied, so it'd be nice if they did something about it. Even if they just made more of the skills feel better to use, I think that would go a long way. The new aoe shotgun animation is fantastic, for example, but the overall aoe rotation is so boring that it doesn't fully make up for it.