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.