Could Merit Points/Job Points or another sort of character progression work for FF14?

[Daralii]

I feel like it probably wouldn't work well, they've pruned a lot of things for the sake of making the game easier to balance, so adding a system where players could put points into whatever would either need to not matter in regards to balance or they'd have to balance every combination of choices.

I put on my tinfoil hat and came up with a theory: an expansion-specific leveling system akin to field ops(elemental/mettle/knowledge), with each job having something similar to a phantom job to provide skill progression. It allows Yoshida to have technically been telling the truth without them actually changing the formula.

[BigCheez]

I put on my tinfoil hat and came up with a theory: an expansion-specific leveling system akin to field ops(elemental/mettle/knowledge), with each job having something similar to a phantom job to provide skill progression. It allows Yoshida to have technically been telling the truth without them actually changing the formula.

You're describing WoW's borrowed power systems. They stopped doing them after Shadowlands and that was universally celebrated. Hopefully they don't go down this path because it's awful.