The topic has already been beaten like a dead horse, but yeah, the Catalyst is way undertuned as-is. I do think the concept has potential, but the devs need to loosen up and allow the class some more access to powerful abilities and weapon skills that complement its core idea.
It seems like the Devs consistently approach designing the Elementalist with a high degree of restraint. It's like there are so many inherent handicaps built into the design so as to prevent them from being too powerful that the end result is just not fun and needlessly complex with underwhelming results. Why master the optimal rotation on Catalyst for mediocre DPS when you can just auto attack on Revenant or face roll and win on Scourge?
Elementalist has always been a "thinking person's" class, and that's evident in the mastery required for Weaver and even some Tempest specs, but there needs to be a payoff for achieving expertise over the mechanic, and I don't see that yet for Catalyst with the way it looks right now. This fact is compounded with the totally uninspired trait line and utility skills. Where the other trait lines have loads of flexible synergies with each other, the Catalyst traits are blunt, linear, and offer minute variations on one particular playstyle.
The jade spheres are underwhelming on all fronts. Again, the devs seem to have overestimated this mechanic and loaded the mechanic up with handicaps. Not only do the F5 skills have a rather long cooldown, it's shared across elements, it costs its own unique energy, has a cast time, and the fields aren't particularly big or long-duration. There is little in the way of meaningful support here; for all this build-up, you're getting a water field with 1 second of Resolution.
I would like to see the Devs loosen up a bit on the Elementalist and give the Catalyst some more power. There is a place for a class that can drop big, powerful combo fields on allies that are fortified with blast finishers and attunement-aligning, but if that's the concept, let it be that.