Quote Originally Posted by Rongway View Post
The MSQ duties use single button combos because you can't expect every player who plays through the MSQ to know how to play every single job so that they can finish the story. For real jobs, the devs expect players to know enough basics not to press buttons out of order.
True or not, 3-step combos that don't branch could, and should, be reduced to 1 button if for no other reason than condensing bar space. If they want classes to have as many superfluous buttons as SAM or BLM have, nevermind AST or PLD, they need to condense redundant buttons down, and the best place is just to make 3-step combos 1 button. For most classes it wouldn't even make it harder or easier to play, it's just about not having useless buttons.

After that it's mostly about getting rid of redundant buttons like Shoha/Shoha 2, Foul/Xenoglossy. Basically mutually exclusive skills that have a single target and AoE version of what is otherwise an identical skill. But button bloat is another problem unto itself.