It's a tank with a ranged phase, a large personal buff and a DoT with a short cooldown, with a lot of freedom on where it places abilities in the rotation.

Optimising how much potency you can squeeze in during an encounter for paladin ends up becoming very complicated compared to most jobs.

Paladin can optimise around disconnects, around the boss jumping away, around which phase to be in when the boss is pulled (based on later disconnects and ultimately kill time).

A very simple general-use example is popping fight or flight with 18 seconds left on the countdown timer to open with DoT application and go straight into magic phase after that.

You can follow the general rotation and do fine, but it's toolkit gives a lot of room for per-encounter optimisation.