Of course you don't. Which is why I think an alternative to fixing this would be to just have everyone have access to only their starting roles, because gaining access to the other roles at the point of the game that they do really defies all purpose, since if I decided to make Vanille a Commando at that point, she would really suck as one anyway. So either of the two other solutions would be better than what we got.

Oh yeah, I forgot equipment upgrading exists. I never used it and I don't think I died more than once in the game Oh no, wait, I did use it, once, by the end of the game, when I injected everything I had into Lightning's new weapon and accidentally got an Ultima Weapon. Seriously, the whole thing is super unintuitive and I really don't understand why we couldn't just have either a traditional weapon system where we just found weapons along the way and could buy them, or an upgrade-only system like in FFVIII.