All accounts upgrading to Square enix accounts

[Alhanelem]

and Ultimate <whatever> are third-party card processors,

Ultimate Game Cards are game cards, not exactly a payment processor. You buy game cards in a store and you can redeem them for Crysta (or whatever else). This allows people to pay WITHOUT a credit card.

What still hasn't been answered (please enlighten us Camate) is if it will still be possible to pay SE directly (with a 3-D Secure card or whatever). SE doesn't seem to understand that a lot of people don't like Clickandbuy because they consider it a disreputable company (debatable) or because some people will be forced to pay additional fees (not debatable, but depends on where you live and other things) to pay for their subscription. II am guessing this is still possible, because of the talk about 3D Secure crap, but SE needs to clarify this.

Crysta works well enough, but because you can't add the exact amount needed for your subscription, you'll always have at least a small balance on your account that you cannot retrieve (because of the 95 cents in the base subscription fee).

Can we link a POL US with a Square-enix PAL account this time?

I can basically guarantee you that won't change.

Also, this just adds yet ANOTHER password i have to remember.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the whole point of this was to eliminate POL IDs and thus their associated password. You can have more than one FFXIV account on the same SE account- It simply asks you to select one to use. You still use the same login and password regardless of which service account you use.