As a gamer since about 1976 it's my opinion that people just change.
In regards to playing habits I mean.

Over an 11 year period (this games life span so far) you're going to see massive changes in people's attitudes. And what they want to, or are prepared to do.

The massive mistake I see happening on all the online forums that I visit to read about FFXI, is that because the average person who uses the forums is a dedicated hardcore player, they assume that that is the norm within the game.
- It's not.

Probably 80-90% of the people playing FFXI just play it for something to do. As a 'game' if you will.
Dressing up and running around thumping big monsters sort of thing.
Crafting because it's something you can do if you can only log on for 10-15 minutes at a time.

No one would sensibly go back to 35 years ago when we sat in our living rooms watching Commodore 64 games take 20 minutes to load a game from a cassette tape.
But these things happened. And they changed over the years. To the point that I can now load games in an instant a lot of the time if I want to play something offline that loads quickly.

And FFXI changed too.
And like it or not, the devs in my opinion do know that the vocal minority of 10% of hardcore players, are NOT the ones that will kill the game if they all leave. It's the 90% of casual bumming around players like myself that they are trying to keep most of all.