Talent tree (spec) suggestion

[NegativeS]

Talent trees don't really work, they are an illusion of choice there is always a meta build, and inferior builds.

Different types of content would have different 'metas', and the ability for people to experiment and engage in discourse about it opens up a whole new metagame for people to engage with. I do not think a talent system would fit FFXIV (at least, in its current iteration of job design), but I hear the 'illusion of choice' argument all the time in WoW discussions and it never holds any water. Having a choice is better than not.

[Carighan]

Having a choice is better than not.

In a vacuum, yes. But as WoW has amiably shown over the years with its many many many iterations of both talent trees and other systems, it's not in a vacuum, rather talent trees drain dev time, proportion to the amount of fake choices you want to offer. Sure, you could always go the GW2 route, that between its massive amount of choice for skills and weapons coupled with specs just gave up, throws 100 things at the wall and hopes 5 skills, 2 weapons and a few talents stick (enough to make 1 full spec), but even then you gotta bugfix/maintain the others (and GW2 famously had very broken skills for very long based on not doing bugfixing).

So no, it's not necessarily better. If we assume that devs don't have enough management-cleared job rework time to get balancing done or fixing DRK or nerfing Picto or removing Viper and coming up with a concept that actually feels unique and interesting and viper-y instead, then we got to assume that this would become even slower and also that implementing talent trees would take an equivalently long time. So we'd have the talent trees for the first role by 10.0 or so. :P