That fear also came from a time when FFXI was at its lowest in terms of "fun" and enjoyable content. WotG didn't offer much of anything in terms of endgame stuff and a lot of people were getting banned. (Salvage, gardening, random autobans) Debate the bannings if you want, but plenty of people who didn't deserve to be banned were and it caused fear in people who knew this.

Having XIV become what that was was something we didn't want. Excusing XIV's crappyness with that though is silly because it wasn't even a completed game and in fact all of those reasons we hated XI at the time are some of the reasons XIV sucks.