Mac version won't load title screen - perma crash on startup

The launcher loads, game updates, click green play button - a new window pops up, FINAL FANTASY XIV, cursor changes to in game cursor, but then nothing. Nothing appears in the window, no sound plays, and it does not enter full screen. The game runs smooth like butter when I dualboot into Windows. If I try to minimize the black window that is open it crashes giving the following "Exception raised" error: http://i.imgur.com/ScntK1B.png

I've heard a lot of horror stories about the Mac version but I can't even get the game to launch to check it out... is this thing really like a wineskin? Was this just a big waste?

MacPro (Early 2008)
OS X Yosemite 10.10.3
2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
9 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

I have basically the same problem. I get the error: http://cl.ly/bmll while sometimes it is a slightly different second number, the first is pretty much always the same. For what it's worth, I have zero issues playing other bigger games, like WoW or Arkham City. I even have no problems with EVE Online which is developed for Mac using the same emulator layer that this client uses.

My hardware:

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013)
3.5GHz Intel Core i7 (Quad core)
32GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4096 MB
OS X Yosemite 10.10.3

There is also a crash report from the p_drive directory ( Library/Application Support/FINAL FANTASY XIV/p_drive/ ) here: http://cl.ly/bmHE

I am experiencing a similar problem. I can star tthe launcher. But then i keep getting a critical directX error message when I try to select the Play button. I have submitted a ticket raising the problem.

Yeah my ticket has been sitting for 3 days now... I'm starting to think they're just ignoring all Mac tickets