Square obviously not listening to feedback

[Equitable_Remedy]

To go with this example, time played, by itself, is meaningless.

I'm not sure what "by itself," means here, but I disagree. Roughly, if the number of hours on SMN per player hour increased sharply after and since the rework, that's decent evidence that players generally like new SMN more than old SMN. It's not conclusive, but it is definitely evidence.

When it's FC raid night, and someone asks, "Can someone please play a caster?", I go, "Yeah, I'll switch to SMN." I don't have fun with the job; I think the job is lacking in many ways. But when I'm in voice chat with some friendly folk, I'm willing to suffer that. I don't normally play a caster, but SMN is a freebie, so in the spur of the moment, whatever.

Where as before Endwalker SMN, maybe I would have put the effort into learning RDM or BLM, both jobs that I actually have fun with, but haven't felt like taking the time to learn to play competently.

Do you think that the average hour played on SMN is under duress, or that this is an edge case? I think that we can agree that this anecdote is probably not representative of the average hour played on SMN.

You say that, of the three available caster options, you choose reworked SMN in preference to BLM or RDM but that you might not have chosen pre-reworked SMN - that is exactly evidence that the rework worked for you! It's actually an example of reworked SMN satisfying your needs (a caster that you can pick up easily) when old SMN wouldn't have.

Put another way, you're looking at the wrong thing: you say that reworked SMN isn't fun for you, but it in fact best satisfies your needs to have fun with your FC, which is why you picked it over the other two casters. The fun is "filling the caster role to raid with your FC," and reworked SMN is the best way for you to do that.