Actually, other than the egi thing, they said no to special stats from the get-go due to the balancing nightmare. Add-ons are still inbound. Odin is an open-world primal and you see how much a shit-show that is. Open-world fights are overrated, as they will ALWAYS turn into zerg-fests (part of the reason I prefer instances in MMO to curb people's stupidity).
Also if I remember correctly, Yoshida said there would be only 1 job per expansion from this point forward. The reason why the last 3 were messes was because the team didn't have enough manpower to balance 3 entire new jobs and fine tune them before launch. He said they would limit it to 1 job and that way it won't get released as an unholy mess.
