I'm sitting on over 12mil gil right now and have the extra 2 retainers. While I'm a Legacy player, I did start anew on Leviathan, so this is all from scratch. I can guarantee you that the extra 2 retainers have little to do with my gil acquisition. In fact, I can guarantee you that because of those extra 2 retainers, I've spent more time gearing them up (they're 50 from a while ago though) and gathering ventures coins or seals for coins than was probably worthwhile from any reasonable "P2W" system. The reason I still do it? It's fun to gamble with Quick Adventures, which being lv50 means next to nothing for.
Having the extra potential for selective goods I might need (like crystals) or an extremely low chance for decent/fun equipment is nice (I have SCH, DRG, and WHM mog weapon from QA, none of which I can use yet) but none of this really impacted what I'd do normally otherwise. I don't really use the extra retainers to sell stuff, at least not to the extent that I couldn't have done the same with my default ones (e.g. retainer 1: selling 12 items, retainer 2: selling 14 items, retainer 3: selling 5 items, retainer 4: selling 5 items, total of 36 items (less than 2 retainers worth)). They're honestly not as impacting as people might think they are. Yeah, they can provide you a low but steady income, but you're still spending venture coins and waiting for them to return to keep that up. I didn't get as much gil as I have now simply waiting for the game to give me it.
My point is that the extra 2 retainers provide little benefit to be even remotely considered a Pay 2 Win option. The amount of goods that I could get simply from the retainers, combined with an equivalent of time that a venture coin is worth, pales in comparison to what I'd get just doing what I normally do in a fraction of the time.
