Great post OP, agreed 100%.
This is what bugs me the most. The way they've been showing off this feature in live letters for a year (I think, didn't check) made players think this would be a feature available to all Free Companies. I'm sure many thought they were available for them right on the patch day. Then they showed us these prices and everyone was shocked.
Now I'm not against long-term goals in a MMO - on the contratry. But this feature hasn't been marketed as such, and hence the disappointment. And even if it had been, it's extremely demotivating having to save up months and months just for a slice of land (a small one, on the lowest rate area). It would be very different if we could at least get a land, to have something to work with, and then start building our house, even if very slowly... I don't know. I just feel, once again, like I've been completely mislead by SE.
Our FC had saved up 2M gil. Most our members have somewhere between 100k and 1M. On Balmung, a Legacy server where the smallest land on lowest rate area costs 20M. This just doesn't make any sense to me.
