The Fast Mage Problem

[Karishi]

Nope, what will actually happen is what WoW and many other MMO have been trying to do. Giving players agency and option to be creative by having choice in the matter.

The result is always the same. One meta emerges, everyone follows the meta.

Y.P isn't wrong on that. Why waste time, energy and money on developping specialisation if for 99% of the population to ignore it and just play "the meta".

They'll just design the job to be "meta" from the get go, end of the story.

For PVE, there will always be a mathematically better option. ESpecially in FF14 whose combat are so rigid.

Not saying current materia are fun, but what you propose is simply impossible.
It isn't a solo game where someone can do something they prefer, altough less effective, because they prefer it. Peer pressure is strong.

You could fool yourself into believing that materia would be different, it wouldn't. There'd be a meta build, or maybe multiple like "dungeon build" and "savage build" or whatever, but people would still notice you "making the wrong choice".
You'd have a set of choice, you might try out a few things, then at some point you'll learn what's best... and you'll equipe that.

You can understand someone "playing wrong" because they struggle with the rotation. But something like materia tend to have people be less patient.

Just run a dungeon as an Ice mage or a full tenacity tank, see how long before some people call you out on this.

You say that for PvE there will always be a mathematically better option and "everyone" will go for/demand it, but people are still playing Black Mage in Ultimate content in spite of the presence of Picto. They're clamoring for BLM to get a buff, but they're playing it.
I do think there's a difference in scale between balancing 20-30 strictly-regulated jobs to one another and 100-300 potential do-it-yourself specs. WoW "handles" this problem by...not balancing those specs to one another and acting like it's not a problem, leading to the power level being found by the community instead of set by the devs and everyone needing to follow the meta just to be close to the power level. But that's not the only way to run things. City of Heroes has multiple orders of magnitude more builds - seriously, tens of thousands to millions, depending on how you're counting it - but doesn't have the same issue because their entire organizing principles for high-end content are different.
But I respect Y.P.'s logic: Basically, generating a whole bunch of specs is spending work-hours to produce the problem of having to then balance all those specs.

As someone else pointed out, Ice Mage is just ignoring a bunch of the buttons you got that give you more damage. But Tenacity Tank, it actually could take years before anyone calls you out. Outside of extremely top-end content the core stats on your gear give you everything you need to succeed; You can get away with melding nothing at all.