There are a sizeable number of people at 50 and the general consensus seems to be that ranged are a bit OP and/or melee is a bit UP, and WAR pales to PLD as tanks.

The details of both of those statements invite an exhaustive list of complaints and perspectives, but for the sake of brevity, do we have ANY idea that SE is actually aware of its own terrible job at class design/balance/tuning?

This is not even getting into the terrible oddities in some of the crafting classes... (i.e. Alchemists need 1200+ Tomes of Philosophy for 3 Hi-Elixirs that can be bought from the marketplace for a few thousand gil because they are apparently normal drops for any random adventurer going through story dungeons...)