Examples of Housing Done Right
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-- Very nearly everything depicted is a placeable that has been arranged by a builder (some are mine, some are others'). These are but small (And I do mean small) examples of what can be done with an even halfway decent housing system, for those of you that have never seen such things and/or think FF14's housing system is, in any way, even vaguely decent.
All of these screenshots come from the game RIFT, where the housing system is readily available to low level players. They give you a freebie 'dimension' - instanced plot - and you can earn/craft thousands of different things to add and build with in your areas. You can have more than one if you buy more dimension slots out of their cash shop, though everyone gets one for free. In-game currency, reputation with various factions and assorted in-game achievements and various dungeon/raid drops can all reward fancy stuff, and most every crafting skill's able to make a good handful of various placeables. The new Dreamweaving skill is all about making dimension placeables, including new particle effects, terrains, entire dimensions (plots) exclusive to Dreamweaving and so on.
Building PVP dimensions for such things as player-made coliseums, duel arenas and so forth is en'route, with plans for players to be able to customize different rule formats, timers, partition combat/non-combat areas and so forth.
Guilds also receive dimensions based on their level that are fully customizable by everyone with permissions set for such doings. I've seen amazingly detailed sprawling castles with hidden passages and labyrinthine hallways featuring over 5000+ placeables that probably took a thousands of hours to collectively build, and far more modest projects of someone solo-building some nice little hut for themselves that looked pretty nice after maybe an hour's worth of putzing with a meager amount of money and no special placeables at all.
RIFT dimension housing went live with their Storm Legion expansion on Nov. 13, 2012, and released in a very accessible, entirely useable state. Players have since become able to have multiple dimensions active at the same time, false boundaries have been made invisible so splendorous views don't get ruined for being too close to a plot boundary and so on. All in all, the system hasn't actually changed much since release; it released in a very respectably solid state that's only been improving since.
Now lets look at FF14's housing. Graphically, it could be said to generally be superior as FF14 does nothing so right as being pretty. This is a gorgeous game. RIFT's a dang pretty game too, but not to such extents as FF14. Never let it be said that Square Enix isn't about near top in the industry for making digital beauty.
Unfortunately, that beauty doesn't extend to that which lies under the praiseworthy. In terms of strict usability, FF14 housing is perfectly fine, but they've arbitrarily limited what you can put where in a plainly crippling fashion that's only made alarmingly worse by the viciously tiny number of placeables allowed in a given plot.
In RIFT, the free newbie area they give you at level 9-ish allows for up to 150 placeables. For paltry sums of in-game currency, you can easily double that, though the cost of buying hundreds of placeables to make use of more allowance will keep a motivated builder busy, but realistically so. A low level player could, with a moderate amount of motivation, very easily scare up enough money over a few weeks' time to buy 500 of the cheaper placeables and get very creative indeed.
Its a gentle slope that can ramp up into the other extreme end of trying to get all the achievements from a certain 20-man Tier 2 raid so you can get a certain exclusive placeable. Some things only drop off mobs out in the world, such as eponymous Riftspawn planar critters. Some can only be storebought, many (and a growing number here) can only be crafted (particularly with Dreamweaving). Some can only be gotten for completing various collections of artifacts.
Its a very good system that's only getting better. Trion knows how to do housing right (now if only they could figure out some of their other issues. Housing and how to implement it intelligently isn't, thankfully, amongst said issues for Trion) whereas Square Enix seems to be ...confused by so very many things to do with all of it.
They clearly don't understand why the central interest in housing exists. Its to be able to make awesome stuff and show it off to friends and strangers. I can't discern what the purpose of SE's housing is other than to be a gil sink. They built this system to solve one of their mismanagement problems requiring them to need a huge gil sink immediately, not to deliver more fun to you, Joe Player.
I'm sure they incidentally hope you have fun with it, and seem to expect that you very well should, but with the limitations they've baked into their own system...I'm not sure just who they were trying to appeal to. There's nothing much here for a dedicated builder. 200 piece limit in a monstrously expensive and largely static plot framework?
And they're serious about this. This is apparently their idea of good.
Look again at some of the screenies above. That's as close as apologists for FF14's housing will ever get to good building environments; pictures from other games.