Pictomancer is insanely overtuned and needs to be fixed before savage drops.

[CKNovel]

The DPS gap between melee and PCT, when it exists and isn't in PCT's favour, is an order of magnitude smaller than the DPS gap between tanks and healers. I'd be curious to know if you'd be willing to have healers overlap with and conditionally outdamage tanks.

Definitely! While it's true their rotation isn't complex, I don't think it's a good reason to have them so low, I don't think complexity of a job is a good basis for balance.
So having healers outdpsing me in a content where I must disconnect a lot or play badly? It makes sense to me.

There's an expectation that players have going into melee of higher risk, higher adrenaline, higher damage gameplay. It always feels safer attacking from range. The devs design for that experience. That's not to say that you can't find skill expression on other roles, but melee exists for the thrill of the challenge.

Well that's a correct expectation, you'd think the more fragile ranged character should be able to dish damages safely from a distance and that's been the case in many MMOs.
But in XIV the reality is completely reverse, I've played the both sides and even in Eden that mobility was worthless, most mechanics can be dealt with at melee range and we can find strategies that allows melee uptime.
Even in the case where we must disconnect, it's very rarely more than a GCD. Melee also have tools to recover much better and I just question myself if MNK isn't straight up better than DNC in terms of healing support... But that's another debate.

The current issue with magical ranged DPS is that they offer tremendous flexibility collectively as a role. Gearsets make it trivial to switch jobs within the role during progression (especially in contrast with melee), giving you access to raises, raidwide mitigation, mobility, and high damage as you need between lockouts. PCT has upset the balance by being a BLM replacement that even SMN mains can swap off into while offering no real drawback outside of a loss of raise. There needs to be a bigger trade-offs in terms of ease of optimization and utility, or else the job ends up dominating progression.

In the case of PCT that's true, the trade-off is to low for all the advantages. I don't disagree there's a need for a trade-off.
What I disagree with is that many jobs pays a tax on what should be their strengths.

PCT needs to be more taxed while RDM, SMN, MCH, BRD and DNC are overtaxed.

I think gear set are more of a game issue, there was no point in having more than 2 sets, they pretty much shot themselves in the foot with NIN gear. Plus, I don't really think you'd move away from a job during prog as you're acquainted with timings at this point.
Playing a job we're familiar with is more often better than playing a job that's meta.