No more derivative than XI's lore.
FFXI doesn't have Lighting running around the game, people dressed in Cloud outfit and the entire CT arc that it's heavy lifted from FFIII. FFXIV is a game without a strong sense of identity, as opposed to FFXI (lol even the races are derivative)

XIV is boring and relies on nostalglia.

FFXIV 1.0. had a stronger sense of identity, though.

I found the story to be quite compelling.
If you think stuff like Titan's party arc or Garuda's crystal arc are compelling, I don't know what to tell you.

Even Gaius stuff was embarrassingly boring.

The lore is incorpoated into the game. I don't even understand what you're trying to get at here.
FFXI lore is incorporated (well, these days mostly WAS) into the game. Everything in the game world had to fit the established rule-set. In FFXIV we kill Ifrit with Fire while our cat girl in bikini rides Odin horse we bought on the cash-shop.

Every class and job in XIV (including the crafting/gathering ones) has a story arc, and those arcs also continued in the expansion. in FFXI, after you did the AF quests, that was it. They never expanded on them, not directly at least.
Too bad the writing is garbage. I think the only Job storyline I enjoyed among the 3 jobs I had at 50 was the SCH, and that was heavily lifted from FFXI Tonberry storyline.


Sorry, but we are not on XIV forum. You won't convince people XIV isn't bad because here people have more expectations than running their cat girls in bikini and logging 2 hours at day to run 2 instances and cap tomes for gears they'll replace in 3 months.