Quote Originally Posted by vetch View Post
You could say that with the amount of obligate AoEs in the game now, on multiple jobs, that it seems like they have no intention of doing anything clever with adds, ever again, but if so, why waste precious button slots splitting Shoha from Shoha 2 and Edge of Darkness from Flood of Darkness? I'm not sure that it's a foregone conclusion.
Just to quickly comment on this one thing:

Sadly, Yoshida already covered this in a Live Letter or pre-expansion interview or something. Searching for a specific Yoshida interview / stream is always an exercise in information-seeking torture, but to paraphrase from memory, it was something like:

"We noticed that a lot of times players in Dungeons weren't using their AOEs very much. So we thought, what if we give everyone more AOEs, and make it more obvious that you're supposed to use them? And so that's why we decided to expand on AOE skills so much, so players could have more fun in content like that."

That's extremely heavily-paraphrased (please don't consider it a citable source), but that was the basic vibe: the AOE bloat since ShB has been implemented specifically with "having fun" in Dungeons / trash pulls as the design intent.