Positives of an I/L?

Your last statement was completely unnecessary.

I never said Elquines was strong. If anything, Elquines and Ifrit are helpful in the lower 4th job for their extra DPS, but they rapidly become among the most useless skills in the Arch Mage's skillset in the higher levels. Also, I never said Paralyze was strong either. I merely said that CL is weaker than Paralyze on single target and weaker than Fire and Ice Demon on 4+ targets. I'm sure you're already aware of this. However, to put things into a better perspective, imagine this: Rick, a 14x average shadower was able to deal double the DPS I could (level 164) on Scarlion+Targa, despite me spamming meteor on them.

I'm quite amused that you don't wish to train with your best mobbing skill in a gold mine. By choosing to use seal and CL to train, you'd be cutting your experience twofold; you'd train even slower than a Shadower does. Logic says: you kill twice as fast, so you'd gain time ores twice as fast, so you'd not only earn the money you used on potions back, you'd make profit. Wasting time using meager skills just so you can save that MP is useless.

Anywhoo, we're derailing the topic.

I'd be using the other skills because training with just blizzard is boring. I have fun training with seal and CL. And on smaller mobs, like the ones that usually form in oblivion 4, I'd probably be better off with CL anyways, since 8 hitting a small mob with CL is faster than 2 hitting it. And as I said before, if I happen upon a large mob, I would use blizzard, but that rarely happens at ToT. Then again, you probably have more experience in ToT than I do and know how often large mobs occur; however, from what I've seen they don't happen often.

And one reason to make a mage is because skills are constantly changing. Pretty much every set of rebalancing in KMS mages get changed. I'm guessing in either june, july, or if we're lucky april or may we'll get the next update here in GMS. In an interview, KMS claimed they were considering changing the magic formula. If they do, it could potentially mean the end of mage's disadvantages when it comes to onyx apples, and perhaps even in bossing DPS in general. However, if mages get decent bossing DPS I do think we should also train a bit slower, eg. a cooldown time on ultimates.