TL;DR:
Armory system and physical levels. You shouldn't feel like someone drained your body back to when you first laid hands on a weapon just because you took out a claw instead of a wand. If only the armory system had gone much further in how it translated across classes, perhaps in use of concepts too, rather than merely exact abilities, people probably wouldn't have stood for it's loss.
Though the Tanaka abilities may have been slow to "cover all their bases", such as a basic attack, basic defense, basic opportune strike, they at least felt class-specific from the beginning. Skewer felt more "Lancer" than anything current Lancers get until Doomspike.
Nostalgia:
I loved that if I wanted I could be a dodge-centered kiting archer who used air-fist head-bashes fired from my bow after dodging ranged attacks. Or I could be a line-driver stacked with Skewer and Doomspike atop my usual Puncture, and just enough tp growth to use all three without CD overlap.
Points of Possible Improvement:
The weakness was that some of the abilities should have varied further from similar types, i.e. Skewer-Doomspike-Puncture. Puncture could be anti-armor, and the damage dealt ignoring armor would deal additional shrapnel (projectile) damage to enemies behind the target, while Skewer remains the strongest full line-up, with no armor bypass, and Doomspike deals a portion of the damage as shadow, percentage growing as the physical damage is eclipsed by enemy defense.
Or, on the other side, it could have used categorical modifiers. For example, physical linear and single-target attacks would continue to bypass previously ignored armor when fired at the same target from the same area and side of enemy. Maybe linears could also affect the far side. This would do more for battle positioning, in my opinion, that the arbitrary "sides-back-front" system where people simply run over 90 degrees at interval, and back to standard position, with zero regard to their party needed.
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Revision Idea for Battle Regimen:
Imagine this with a revised Battle Regimen system. Rather than being locked into a party-wide attack chain, this simply allows you to select "systems" to build on or players to build from, such as casting Aeroga on a Fira system, with some unique effects atop the larger obvious ones. Or you can cast Aero on a Lancer, extending the reach of his next attack. Cast on Fleetfoot, to cause dodges to deal air damage to enemies on the far side of the Pugilist.
Magic wouldn't be the only thing chaining together with other magics or physical either. It's just that the physical-physical combination effects go off mostly automatically. For example, two Red Lotus attacks made on the same enemy from opposite sides, by the nature of the original spell, would cause the AoE to expand further to the sides, between the attackers, instead of going out the far side. Two Skewers from the same angle would share some of the damage loss from armor, to a sum greater than if they'd been attacking more separately. Attacking from different sides, however, would reduce the enemy's dodge chance.
All it requires is some mechanical changes put into place. Things like... parrying or blocking an attack has a matter of force, atop the simple RNG, and that the chance of being able to make any of the three physical mitigation types (dodge, parry, block) is also based within timing, such as from attacking with the parrying weapon. It should take account and advantage of a larger variety of factors that more greatly then involve your party or internal strategy and skill.
Massive Disclaimer:
That said, this revised Tanaka idea probably couldn't exist on a Tanaka server framework...
