It's not drastic enough when you consider the fuck-ton of gear FFXI had along with all the jobs you could play. If they were going to include so many pieces and allow side-grades, then shouldn't they have been more potent? I'm not talking about making one of THFs A-class skills even better with evasion gear (not to mention the fuckload of evasion traits they get) which still isn't even enough to allow you more freedom in your subjob. When you think about that sentence, itemization in FFXI seems pretty sad.
I'm talking about making B or C-class categories into viable options with gear, or changing the function of a job/role when it was viable, but that wasn't possible. For all jobs, gear only served to make the primary roll function better in slightly different ways. For DDs, it's speed and damage, for mages, it's potency/accuracy and something MP related, for tanks, haste mostly as well as whatever damage reduction they could find. Along with gear, job design and skill categories were a problem that only got bigger the higher up in levels you get making it harder to perform secondary rolls on relevant targets.
When you look at all gear available, you see that there isn't any real choice or freedom, just an overwhelming amount of gear that may or may not suit your needs. You took THFs A+ class skill and could barely make it an effective gear choice. For an A-class skill, wouldn't you expect more return for fighting equal or higher leveled creatures? Especially if you focused your gear on it. Yet, this was not the case and you still need /NIN to cover you.