I can't find the fun in this game any more

[ForteNightshade]

It's sickening how they make BLU a limited job but Pictomancer a DPS. I love Relm from FF6, but BLU is the staple FF job..

And what made Blue Mage a staple? It's functionality to essentially be anything and everything. A design direction completely at odds with mainline jobs and MMO design in general. Blue Mage simply cannot exist as the overpowered swiss army knife it normally is when balance between roles needs to be achieved. They are never going to allow for one job to split between roles. So that right there means a standard Blue Mage loses any aspects of being a tank or healer. You couldn't balance the absurd abilities it gets without turning them into a basic rotation that amounts to little more than animation fluff. You want regular job Blue Mage? All the spells you'd learn from mobs would be via questing, you'd get a standardized rotation like every other job in the game and you'd be a one trick DPS. Think of Red Mage or even Bard in a sort of "proc Caster" system. That's your mainline Blue Mage.

The only issue with limited jobs is how restrictive those limitations are. There's no reason they can't do Deep Dungeon or Eureka. Who cares if they're overpowered? That's the whole point. If that ever gets added then they're actually the best designed versions of themselves. They just need content.

The game hasn't changed much between Heavensward to now. Changed, sure, but not much. It is just more of everything we already had.
Sounds more like your problem lies with you. You are probably burned out on FFXIV and need a long break from it.

On the flipside. This is just a ridiculous take if I'm being blunt.

- Tanks lost an entire system, albeit one that became increasingly less relevant as Stormblood pressed on.
- Healers went from having several DPS abilities to one they spam. Not to mention, in Heavensward and even parts of Stormblood, is was impossible to GCD-less heal higher end content. You actually needed to consider when to use abilities like Medica II for optimization purposes. Nowadays, you won't touch that button whatsoever in at the Savage level. Even in a PF setting, both healers won't press more than ten GCDs between them.

Several jobs have been massively overhauled. Summoner is the obvious stand out but Astro, White Mage, Warrior, Dark Knight, Ninja, Monk and Bard all play vastly differently than they did from prior iterations. At a basic level, sure, you probably wouldn't notice some of the changes but for anyone playing them at even a decent level, many of those changes have been significant. And not necessarily good.

Whole systems like TP, boss movement, the aforementioned tank stance, MP management and buff synergy have either been removed or rendered largely irrelevant in some form or another.

All I'll say is that it is impossible in real life to learn from something if you can't live through it. If I got shot by a firearm and am now dead, I am not going to learn how to dodge a bullet. If every other mechanic is going to check if someone is dead and if they are, the raid dies, no one is going to learn much of anything.

You keep prattling this sentiment and it's objectively false. You don't need to live through a mechanic to understand how it functions. You simply need to see the end result. In fact, a fairly common criticism and frustration point in PF is getting someone who limped past their prog point without the slightest clue how the mechanic actually worked. I'll even cite myself as an example here given I struggled mightily with Classical Concepts 2. Living through that mechanic wouldn't have made me understand it any better. I was simply approaching in a poor way by attempting to rotate the whole arena in my head. Once I broke down the mechanic in a way that made sense, I seldom wiped to it ever again. Simply getting a damage down instead would have actually made the fight easier as we were well ahead of enrage upon cleaning. So what would a tank damage down or even death matter?

While Endwalker has definitely gotten too heavy handed with body checks, you need some of them otherwise it vastly reduces the difficulty of high end content. The alternative would be significantly steeper enrages where getting even a few damage downs was a guaranteed wipe. I don't think that would garner any better a response from players.