I have to agree, I was RDM for the fight in question and I hated all of it but the job shouldn't give because the fight design was atrocious. Instead the devs should playtest with all the jobs and ask "does this work?", that should have lead them to move that part of the fight to a one minute window instead of a two minute.

As regards salvaging it now that the damage is done, I could see some good from just making magic-melee attacks do full damage within melee range and when beyond melee it could use a blade-beam animation and lose some of it's damage (20% maybe?) so it's not a complete loss when at range but it's still better to be in melee range. Also drop that bit from manafication, just make it a stock feature of the attacks themselves. It doesn't fix bad fight design and it doesn't fix this change but it would be better.