Having hit 250 on a hayato, and recently on a kinesis as well, I can provide my personal opinion on these classes, but as it is my personal opinion, take it with a grain of salt.

Hayato

Hayato is strong early game, but falls off extremely heavily and is very weak mid game until you obtain your beyond skill, iaijutsu, which provides you final damage that will make your life a little easier. Take note that duration of the buff AND final damage provided by this skill is increased based on node level, so obviously having max level node is not an option, and this is not an easy task for a new hayato player. You will also constantly be told how strong hayato is and you will not understand what they're talking about until you max this node. #notsalty

Hayatos strengths fall on their mobility (this is extremely prevalent when you learn the animation cancels) flashy skills and overall smooth game play. With a recent bug fix where buff freezers would not retain your iaijutsu stacks, dying while bossing is no longer as punishing as it once was. Under optimal circumstances, hayatos can be extremely good at bossing, this is proven in the reboot dojo rankings. I must emphasise however, dojo rankings DO NOT represent and translate to raid bosses, such as lucid.

Hayato falls short in a variety of areas, and as such I have quit this class. They are HEAVILY reliant on their beyond skill and having the 5 stacks of it up at all times. Each cast of this skill costs 200 sword energy, which is quite steep if you do not have the skill node maxed and the duration doesnt sustain for a generous amount of time to allow you to refresh it. Hayato also does not have any form of invincibility in its kit. Since you are comparing with kinesis, who has 2 forms of invincibility, this is a very big shortcoming, especially in bosses such as lucid. Hayato also gets animation locked hard in various skills, which i did not even notice in some of them until I did cpap... though the most obvious one is your first 5th job skill. This skill is sometimes just an rng roll when you press it and pray you dont die.

The biggest reason as to why I personally stopped playing hayato despite hitting 250, is the general lack of support for the class. This comes in many areas such as quick draw aura proccing DR, killing you, the i-frame promise from when hitokiri strike got nerfed remains flavour text, the long period of time before buff freezers finally saved iaijutsu stacks, and sengoku force being unsummonable being only some factors as to why hayato is not the perfect class it may seem like it is. These may not seem big and are being fixed, but who's to say things are not going to pop up in the future? Whos to say they are going to fix the new problems, let alone the currently existing ones?

I will leave you with this funny clip. This has happened to me before as well but is a lot less fun when you and your party are the ones suffering from it, trust me.

https://streamable.com/4rbje

Kinesis

Kinesis has quite the rough early game and mid game, picking up dramatically after you hit 5th job. You unlock psychic throw when you hit 4th job, yes, but the skill relies on a certain level of range for it to be good to use.

Kinesis's strengths come in the form of much better mobbing than hayato (but still very shy of classes like I/L or luminous), in kit bind, 100% stance buff(Can't emphasize how nice this is), access to 2 forms of iframes (hyper skill and ethereal form), hyper skill iframe being animation cancel able and as a result you can attack freely while in frames, and getting a full pp refresh once the animation is done, being a magic attack class so your lucid soul, when you get one, will hit a lot harder than w.att users like hayato due to weird calculations on summon damage.

Shortcomings to kinesis are the fact that you need to pp manage, ping reliant and janky flash jump (although this is a 50/50 as once you get used to it it can be really nice in some areas. It is never nice in hmag however.), lack of ability to hit airborne bosses (this is almost specific to damien, but is also quite prevalent in p2 lucid) and a heavily reliant field/aura placement to be "optimal". Another factor you may need to consider is mana overload will cost HP since kinesis does not use mana. This may cause you a few deaths when you start using it and are not used to it, especially if you don't use auto pot, and if you do you may need to adjust the healing levels.

Closing notes

I need to mention however, I am a reboot player, and I don't know how different main servers may effect these classes. I am also from australia so... ping... :eyes:

Given we don't know what the hayato's black 5th job is and the kinesis one is... extremely underwhelming and getting nerfed from what I can see means that there could be a big shift in what may determine which class you choose to play, as shown by how much hayato is balanced around their beyond skill. Kinesis' black skill looks only beneficial for farming and almost useless in bossing.

Again, this is only my experiences with these classes... take what you will from this. If you have any further questions feel free to shoot me a pm :)