What was the reason given for closing console versions of ffxi?

[Isal]

The whole idea to cutting costs is to reduce waste and not cause damage to the product to the point it makes people quit.

If cost cutting leads to player losses then you're doing it wrong.

I'm not sure why sustaining their player base after the game goes into maintenance mode would be one of their priorities... Between Grand Masters and the mobile client, they've clearly decided to put time and money into alternative interpretations of Vana'diel, I believe SE's goal in cutting costs is to cut costs.

[Diraco]

Most PS2 online games used a service called DNAS, Dynamic Network Authentication Service, as a wall to modded systems and cheat applications to keep them out of online games

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It's not just porting the environment. It's that the staff has churned, to where the original developers aren't on the project anymore. You need to keep these people trained on writing for an obsolete environment (PS2 coding skills are different than for other platforms), or train them to rebuild the tools for a new environment. An emulation environment also needs to be accurate to what it is emulating or you add another layer to troubleshoot that can cause bugs and crashes. Emulation with 100% accuracy is really hard, and even Sony hasn't had it perfect on their platforms.
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I think you're right about a port being impractical. It's way too late for any kind of software development to be feasable. Going by the bugs in the game that have been unfixed since 2004, it seems that anyone who knew the original code left shortly after the release of RoZ.

Since the PC doesn't have any of the protections offered by DNAS, it seems silly that it's being used for the PS2 version. I guess Sony never wanted to make any kind of non-proprietary networking available, though. If there was no lack of developers, SE could possibly use the network drivers made for the Linux kit.

[Alhanelem]

In Japan, they produced PS2 HDD units from 2001 to 2010, 9 years versus our 9 months, and Europe's 0 months (excepting Linux Kits, which used the same hard drives, but different interface software bundled with them). There are lots more of them than got distributed for North America. Best of all, the hard drives are exactly the same in Japan and North America (no region lock on hardware besides the PS2 itself, just on software), so you could import one if yours died. PS2 HDDs are in much larger supply than dev kits.

while time to failiure obviously depends on how much you use it, the youngest ones are 5+ years old at this point, and the oldest ones are likely to be dead or dying if they were being used regularly (which I know many ps2 players with failed or failing hard drives) While the truly die hard ps2 player could search around and find one in good shape, it's still a fair consideration. The PS2 is no longer a supported platform (as in by sony, not by FFXI) no matter which country you're in, and it really doesn't make financial sense to FFXI to keep supporting an unsupported platform that's shrinking rapidly.

It's a shame, really. I don't have anything against ps2 players, but anyone had to have known that this would happen eventually- only a matter of when.