It's meant to be approachable and less of a hassle to pick up and play, which is why the difficulty of the game is rooted in managing and dodging mechanics rather than elaborate inreractions between stats and effects and stuff. And this is fine, and it's fun, the real problem with it though is it means battles are only difficult until you win the first time, and then you will generally have an easy time every time after that. Battles in FFXI are usually a little less predictable so you have to be more flexible, making the challenging elements last longer. FFXI is just harder in general, but since a good chunk of that difficulty is in learning to play your job, I think that's why a lot of people had a hard time getting into it (which is too bad because of how much the game has to offer).
FFXI should definitely look at ways to improve the new user experience and hold new player's hands just a bit more at the start of the game, guiding them to the things they should do early on, and then gradually take the training wheels off and encourage people to experiment. Because as old as the game is, I routinely see people, especially FFXIV players, who are curious about this game that's still around. I'm certainly glad that they made the game a lot less of a hassle to set up at least.
Make important NPC's functions more clear- I'm not talking about quest givers, but rather vendors and other NPCs with important functions like conquest guards etc. They could use the already existing nameplate icon system for this, like the bazaar bag to indicate a vendor NPC. Is there actually any reason NPCs can't have icons by their names like PCs?