Dragoon was boring and useless in most of its incarnations before FFXI.
In FF5, Dragoon was one of the most useful melee jobs in the game to master, providing some nice bonuses to strength and stamina. Admittedly, this doesn't make the job itself useful, but in FF5, the only really useful job was Freelancer; everything else was just a way to get abilities and stats for it.
In FF7, Cid's Limit Breaks were some of the most powerful in the game, and everyone could do everything else anyway so that stuff's a moot point.
In FF9, Freya's Dragon Crest ability can deal max damage while ignoring defence and the Protect status, for a mere 16mp. Not to mention Reis's Wind and Lancer being pretty useful at the start of the game.
In Tactics Advance it was a solid damage dealer with useful support abilities like an Auto-Reraise that proc'd after taking physical damage (Tactics Dragoon also had this) and the ability to make dragon-type enemies leave the battle entirely, alongside it's breath attacks and Lancet.
What makes a job boring is purely opinion, so I'm not even going to touch that. :I
As for XI's Dragoon; I'm guessing we just have different opinions on how they should've used the wyvern. :x
Edit: Longer post than I thought. o_o;