I've been thinking about this for a while now. And I understand it would likely be a nightmare to implement, bugs abound, likely never to be considered. Kill off sales of job boosts, on top of declarations of "leveling every job isn't required." So on and so on.

But I'm pitching it anyway.

In the days of ARR, there were 9 combat jobs to level (we're not going to talk about hand/land, cuz those haven't changed/expanded). Shortly after, NIN was added, bringing 2.x up to 10 (but it's really 9 anyway because of Arcanist). I would argue that, at the time, leveling all the available jobs was not a terribly onerous chore, largely due to a lack of fuckall else to be doing with your time.

But, despite complaints to the contrary, there's kinda a lot more to do in the game now. Sure, maybe not all of it is forever long term investment content. But it remains, there's plenty of busy work.

And now, leading into DT, we're coming up on 23 combat jobs. If you consolidate Arcanist jobs, and if you really want to leave out the limited jobs, that's still 20 jobs to keep leveling. We're literally at twice the combat leveling from where we started with. And yeah, there's a lot of "all the new ones start at higher levels, that's less actual leveling" etc. But it remains, anyone interested in keeping up with all the jobs is continually expected to invest more and more time into the process. (see previous acknowledgement that this is in no way a requirement, but you gotta admit it still stands out in a game where "you can do everything on one character")

The only way I can really see to lighten this load is to start a bit more shared exp distribution. And the best way I could think of doing so is going by role. Shared tank, shared healer, shared caster, etc.

Now, I know that's honestly trimming it down maybe a bit too far, only, what, 5 or 6 roles to share between. And I agree. And, frankly, the continued existence of Arcanist just wrecks the whole suggestion (gotta somehow now separate caster and healer exp, otherwise Arcanist jobs could share exp among no less than 8 jobs..).

To make things worse, I'd really say that limited jobs should be excluded from the shared exp as well, as their whole leveling is kinda part of the job's minigame to begin with.

Maybe it's just me not having as much time to play as I used to.. but I still kinda think there should be something to address how much more time a player needs to invest to experience all the jobs compared to where we started.

Or maybe that's why they created the job boosts, to milk all the players that just want numbers to go up without actually understanding the jobs..