Professional 1 in gathering and worse cooking. Are those significant enough to make it the go to lifeskill class? I am not sure, but i am leaning towards no, since the Behr herb rotation  is pretty fast even at professional gathering and you make plenty of herbs to make reagents to power level your worse cooking. It gives her an advantage on being the best milk alt tho. Other than that she got 2 passives that gives her combat xp when gathering or doing worse cooking, those are straight up trash, and a third passive that provides extra weight, but ultimately that is equally great for grinding too.

Her height can be a disadvantage in hunting. You could argue that Musa/Valk gathers better. Fishing/Training/Farming/Trading/Sailing/Bartering  are class independent,  Cooking/Processing has the weight advantage.

Honestly i think the devs call her a lifeskill focused class so they can get away with her half assed skillset, by tacking on some meh to garbage passives.

Shai might be a game changer in large scale, at the cost of a second(or third) set of gear.
Shai might be useful at group content, at the cost of her awakening is basically being a buff vending machine, without the opt-out succession.
The Sol might be cheaper to enhance(that is if you can get white cedar sap off the market or wasting energy going sapping), at the cost of needing to go through the CBT enhancing system,  not being able to buy/sell, and not being able to enjoy the benefits other awakening weapons have.
I like the Florang, too bad there are only a handful of skills for it.
Shai got the ability to play MIDI Megalovania, but honestly, all classes should have access to that feature.
The Donkey is a cute little feature, but it gets overshadowed by horses.

TL;DR: Shai lacks anything meaningful in the lifeskill department to be called lifeskill focused, being a support does not mean it should pushover, being support does not mean the devs should get away without proper design. Screw the Sol, gib Succession.

Shai main,

Give me the following:

10 second CD on both debuff songs. Right now I can only use them every other pack at best.

Absolute skills

Return my tier 3 crit chance and monster dmg addons. Those addon changes really nerfed us pve shai.

The best solution would be to permanently delete Shai from the game.

No no no, have some compassion for our miniscule class and allow her to be BDO's best Support Class :)

I'd like to see Shai fulfil the support role undeniably better than Caster / Valk.

Few ideas:

a)  Make her heals relevant.  Not sure on the specifics of exactly how, I haven't PvP'd with Shai.

- To add spice to it, maybe consider ramping up healing efficency with AP to encourage build diversity.  IE:  Want to be a tanky CC machine in the middle of the fray?  Build DP.  Want to be backline healer / peeler?  Build AP.  Bit of both?  Hybrid.

b)  She is horribly slow.  Let her ride on her Florang like in mobile!

- Thoughts:  Maybe only allow Shai to do limited things while riding.  I'ts primary use is manuvering the battlefield, going from point A to point B.  Receiving damage knocks her off the Florang.  Maybe one skill that allows her to SA and continue riding.

c)  I'm pretty ignorant on Shai mechanics, but do know Shai Support is often overshadowed by Caster / Valk.  Classes that offer arguably better utility and team contribution at a base level - more damage, more CC, more value to a zerg vs zerg fight, etc.  I'd like to see Shai as BDO's premiere Support, in some way shape or fashion. Just think it'd be cool, IDK.  I don't play Shai, but think it'd be cool if she was the best Support Role class, because of right now, I'd go so far as to say DP Striker is a better "support" since he has a ton of CC and mobility, esp compared to Shai.

You were pretty much correct about your points.

I do really like the idea of making ap shai viable for pvp not by increased damage, but by empowering her heals/buffs/debuffs with ap scaling as a backliner. As of now though, she is the worst healer out of all the semi support classes.

Having said that, her kit does not allow her to survive with out full dp set for many reasons such as being very slow and clunky (as you pointed out) especially in awak, bad flowing transitions between skills and stances,  being stuck in animations, no abilitiy to reposition, lack of enough i-frames and of course, no s block.

Overall, for pvp she is great buffer, good debuffer and  decent disabler in my opinion.