The only real way to sort of get around cookie cutters is to try and negate them. which is quite a lot of work to get right.

What I essentially mean is that if you have 4 or 5 major pieces of endgame content design it so that what is optimal in one isn't optimal in the other 3 or 4. but it's really hard to get a level kind of balance across the board.

it was one of the particularly huge flaws in xi. piercing damage was supreme and ice and thunder where the only elements to put your merits into. because i would guess 80% of the bestiary was weak to piercing ice and thunder.

Thus to prevent that sort of thing happening in xiv there would need to be a lot more balance across content and jobs. ultimately though even that wouldn't stop optimal builds. perhaps of the contents available your shell / fc may only focus on 2 or 3 and thus it would be those 2 or 3 that you would end up tailoring your build for. and then you'd respec your stats or whatever when your fc shifted focus to a different set of contents.

I do like the idea of complete freedom in how I build my jobs. but even in 1.0 you could see it was false. hmmm 45 attribute points for my monk where should i put them. bam str and int. every single monk....