Meleewalker to Meleetrail

[Galvuu]

I'm more so referring to when the savage patch drops since they have shown that they are always willing to give BLM massive buffs whenever its needs it.

This is some EW-revisionism. BLM suffered through a lot of ShB and SB. It became good on either expac only in patch in .4, although BLM was decent in 5.0 before Savage dropped.

Are we transitioning from Meleewalker straight into Meleetrail?
Another xpac of ranged being second class citizens?
Too early to tell but I'm placing my bets on it.

The new bosses actually pose some challenge to melee dps. Ofc, this comes with the addendum they challenge casters basically as much, if not more... (not you SMN, you don't count).
Balance is still completely off, but it's dishonest to say the new NM raids don't make melees work quite hard for uptime (I even think perfect uptime might be impossible on some mechanical combinations, though they're only dropping two or three gcds in the whole fight at worst).

You're getting mixed up with Pictotrail. Don't worry, you definitely still have options available to you if you're only able to keep up with sub-30 APM caster gameplay with scheduled coffee breaks between button inputs. Yoshi-p was always going to look out for his main role.

I'm not going to pretend any job in XIV is particularly challenging, but it's funny seeing this take aimed at Pictomancer, which is tied with Black Mage for the highest gap between each percentile- usually a sign that a job has a low floor, a high ceiling or, in the case of these two jobs, both. For the playerbase at large, it seems it's about as hard as any melee at the very least.

[CrystalAurora]

This is some EW-revisionism. BLM suffered through a lot of ShB and SB. It became good on either expac only in patch in .4, although BLM was decent in 5.0 before Savage dropped.

Ironically enough you're revising history because BLM was a top tier DPS job the entirety of Shadowbringers, going neck and neck with SMN (Pre nerf) and never dropping out of the top 3.
You have to go back to pre Alphascape in Stormblood to find a time in which the job wasn't getting buffed for an extended period of time during a time in which it was struggling.

Even when it was "Weak" Last expansion it was just weak in that it wasn't a top 2 DPS job... It was just below some of the melee while being on par or above a couple of them without the gap ever being massive between it and the top dps job.

[Galvuu]

Ironically enough you're revising history because BLM was a top tier DPS job the entirety of Shadowbringers, going neck and neck with SMN (Pre nerf) and never dropping out of the top 3.
You have to go back to pre Alphascape in Stormblood to find a time in which the job wasn't getting buffed for an extended period of time during a time in which it was struggling.

Even when it was "Weak" Last expansion it was just weak in that it wasn't a top 2 DPS job... It was just below some of the melee while being on par or above a couple of them without the gap ever being massive between it and the top dps job.

SMN was arguably the most powerful dps job in the history of the game in patches 5.2 and 5.3. It had the highest rdps- beating BLM consistently on all percentiles, if you check the data for Eden's Verse- with the added bonus of a rez and somewhat superior mobility compared to BLM at the time. Every top 10 fastest kill on any boss in Verse except 3 had a SMN in it (so 3 out of 40), the strongest presence out of any dps job. Of those that had a SMN, roughly 1/3 ran double caster, the rest was standard double melee.
In Gate, you have a 6-4 split between SMN and BLM, which seems to show they were comparable, but both were beneath melee during 5.05 through 5.1 (though technically roughly balanced against each other, even though SMN had a small rdps lead compared to BLM). Since everything BLM brings is damage, the moment another caster overtakes it or even matches it, it's arguably in a rough spot.

So, from 5.05 to 5.4, BLM was either more or less tied with SMN in terms of rdps, or consistently behind it, with SMN having some added utility and slightly better mobility. I don't know how this is congruent with "BLM gets massive buffs when it needs them", since those buffs usually only arrive during the last floors of the entire expansion. Fwiw, the situation in SB was mostly similar- although the difference is that SMN and BLM synergized quite well back then, so when BLM got its buffs in 4.4, double caster could actually compete with double melee, and both comps had equal presence in the fastest kills (in fact, it was a roughly three-way split between double melee, double caster and triple melee).

Not that this aside matters for the topic, which I don't exactly agree to begin with. It's definitely shaping up to be a tier where melee uptime isn't free in the slightest.