Job Complexity and Difficulty

[Shurrikhan]

And it's not as though your perspective isn't valid, given you can recall a time where "Square-Enix wasn't always like this" and believe they can do better if given the chance, while I don't have that frame of reference, I only have the last nearly 3 years of blunders and contradictions from them (and the community at large) and thus meet all these ideas with skepticism and pessimism, and assume harder jobs will happen while content also remains hard, leaving no room for my casual ass at all.

If you've already been limiting yourself to normal content where even half of optimal damage will easily get you through everything and half the effort of optimal play will already get you to 80+% of said optimal damage... why so much concern that the maximum damage (albeit with proportionately or more-than-proportionately increased effort) would increase on jobs currently considered and tuned by the devs as "easy" jobs?

Although there might for example be a couple more buttons to press, not pressing them would only leave you about the same as you were before, which would remain plentiful.

If you were at a tipping point, then those preferences could easily come into conflict, but we're talking about raising skill ceilings here, not floors, by stepping away from the "this job should only be allowed up to X degree of effort and therefore X degree of performance" concept that Yoshida himself says the game is tuned around. You'd still have increasingly diminished returns for increased effort / disproportionately high rewards for merely basic skill.

(That's not a critique, btw; imo, the game should be that way, giving just enough reward to meaningfully incentivize deeper engagement for those who feel comfortable taking that extra step with nonetheless minimal loss to accessibility.)

[Aravell]

Even if your personal intent isn't to raise the floor, other people will still demand everyone jumps to reach the ceiling anyway

In my personal experience back when jobs still had complexities, it was actually the opposite. People back then were far more hesitant to call others out on not playing perfectly because they themselves were not playing perfectly as well.

Even the high-end players found it hard to play perfectly, and that was the fun of it for me personally, the striving to reach higher, not like what we have now where you can pick up a job and figure out 90% of the job's potential after 30 minutes on a training dummy.