no question, they need some bodies in the Dev office if they plan to do anything, even if they keep it to mini-tweaks as they are now. It's called man-hours and there's only so much that a few people can get done in them. In a very real sense the number of bodies in the Devs office can be used as a measure of SE's commitment to XI.

However, I differ with your characterization of no expansions since 2007. The 3 mini-expantions that give augmented gear together add up to almost as much content as RoTZ did, at least in terms of storyline/quests. Abyssea-despite how sparse the storyline is compared to RoTZ, CoP, ToAU and WoTG-gave us 9 new zones, and what ammounts to an entirely new play system since it almost completely changed every game mechanic at end-game levels, at least in concert with the additional 24 levels on all the jobs. Currently, they are in the process of retooling most of the old end-game events to something doable at 99 and-while not completely new content-there's gotta be a hell of alot of workload in redoing Nyzul, Dynamis, Salvage and maybe Einherjar, not to mention adding GoV and thus changing pop zones for at least a third of all the mobs in the game. They are also-1 or 2 at a time-revisiting the job designs themselves in light of game play at 99 (not always to everyone's satisfaction but how often do you satisfy everyone?).

In short, the Devs aren't just sitting there twiddling their thumbs. Hint to SE: if you want to do more of this kind of thing on a scale the playerbase is happy with a few extra bodies on the dev team would be nice. I dare say the ones that are on the current Dev time might also appreciate a few co-workers to help make things happen; some of the comments from Devs/reps are the kind of "snarky" tone you hear when someone has hit a brick wall in terms of how much they can get done in a workday.