The negativity is because FFXIV is fairly young, FFXI isn't, and FFXIV at least has prepaid time cards, which FFXI doesn't. Many of the people affected by this in FFXI lost their only way to pay for the game, while FFXIV had a couple other ways.

As far as short forum cookies, they're not, just certain forum actions cause the server to renew the cookie, which fails if your sub is up. I was able to post for about a year with an inactive subscription by avoiding those actions, during my 2012-2013 break due to financial crisis.

PayPal isn't an option for Japanese accounts because they have prepaid WebMoney cards available all over their country. SE hasn't gotten with the times to expect people to move internationally. I had to fight for 8 months in 2011 to get a region change so I could use my account from JP launch with NA payment methods, sicne I moved and they locked out non-JP cards from processing on JP accounts. SuToCorp was getting to be too expensive with their profit markup and the exchange rate, and to use it for Crysta I would have had to register a false JP mailing address and risk an account ban if they noticed. The response was finally that they would do a region change once in the life of the account. Ugh, and the wife wants to move to Europe after she gets her college degree.