Proud to say that I am one of those ppl. Though despite 1.0 failure, I did enjoy my time there, all the way to Dalamud descend, till server closes for good. Have a blast in Vana'diel completing every story chapters they had, till ARR came out which was around early Adoulin releases. Even during my time in 1.0, LS mates kept talking about how wonderful FF11 are, which did really drag me down to it.
Can't believe any1 would say FFXI was declining at that point, coz I still clearly remembers how terribly congested WKR is & even with all that, still took several days just to beat one, with me ends up camping on corner due to sleep & next thing floor-faced when woke & proceed to ask nearby to rez & continue participating. Even normal reives takes hours just to bring it down with fps really dips so low having so many participant, & saw how my BST, which I proudly grinded & helped finished story content prior to Adoulin, gets absolutely butchered & thus abandoned the job since.
Even Abyssea days gets really crowded, with ppl taking turns on worm parties, or normal xp camps like gusgen mines, crawler's nest, & bosta having very crowded as well. And this is happening on my server Bahamut, can't rly imagine how things goes over more populated servers like Asura back then.