The Bishop: No longer needed?

Wrong. Most people play their classes because they like the playing style. If they find out they don't, then they switch classes. Or they can follow their default and stay with the class they originally picked. It has nothing to do with what's available or not.

While this is possible, not everyone is crazy about Zakum. Your friends aren't on, great. Go kill Pap instead. Oh, you papped twice? No problem, training will take it's place.

Also, don't forget that the reason people don't do 30 man runs is that it lags like hell and the split is near 0 (including the exp being split among 30 people). You don't substitute, you just stick with it and go without them. People nowadays do mostly one or two party runs, and its not hard to get ~10 people in and out of the altar.

I agree with this part of your post.

Well, right. Player satisfaction with their class is always the top priority in continual playing of a class, but in terms of our lesser-used classes having a part in the larger picture, all I meant to say is that we DO in the sense that we're used when no one else is there and people don't want to wait for 30 minutes for another NL to log. But yea, you're definitely right; you have to love your class if you're going to keep playing it.

I guess that goes along with the second part of your post too, on how people usually go on ~10-12 people Zakum runs nowadays just because we can with 4th jobs and new equips/scrolls. In that sense people aren't going to wait until they form a party of 12 NLs; I'm sure many ArchMages are used to this, but I'm often asked by friends forming a random Zakum run to come along if I'm online or whatnot. Usually, as you said, people just ask whoever is online they know can contribute something rather than hardcore organizing like we did 2 years ago. Of course this isn't the case for HT, but even still it will eventually become something that you only need 15-20 people to kill, maybe 3 of which being ArchMages because your main attackers are so damn strong.

In any case my only point was that the game has evolved to one requiring any player to fill the few spontaneous spots rather than the necessary players to fill half the spots, if you know what I mean. In that sense ArchMages, Pallys, etc. are wanted more than usual, so as GameStop would say, "Power to the Players."