How can this remain competitive in the MMO market?

[KRTGDL]

Sorry but no. Shouldering the full costs of the maintenance/development/evolution of a MMORPG for an undisclosed amount of months IS a concrete fact. You may not care, but the fact doesn't change. Anyone that has the slightest idea of the costs that involve would know that.
It's simply unprecedented within the market.

If you demand a company to show you actual fiscal data on investment, you're quite delusional. No one will ever do that. It's not even legal for publicly traded companies to do that oustide official investor calls.

You were unable to comprehend the conceptual distinction I explicitly made, so let me baby step you through it since you're unable to keep up. I understand that keeping the servers running is unprecedented, but it is commensurate with the unprecedented disaster that was/is FFXIV. So keeping the servers running was accidental to, or a necessary requirement of, not completely shutting down the game. With the creeping, slow, and underwhelming content and hotfix updates since the PR stunt, not much progress has been made.

You may be correct about giving particular financial info about the game, I'm not a corporate lawyer. I doubt there are laws that restrict a company from saying "We've doubled the size of the dev team." or "We've greatly increased the production budget." Perhaps in limited circumstances some hard data can be given and I doubt, at least legally speaking, that it's delusional to request it. Again, these are unprecedented circumstances due to an unprecedented, devastating failure.

[Abriael]

You were unable to comprehend the conceptual distinction I explicitly made, so let me baby step you through it since you're unable to keep up. I understand that keeping the servers running is unprecedented, but it is commensurate with the unprecedented disaster that was/is FFXIV.

You must have not played FFXI at launch, or star trek online, or age of conan, or quite a few other MMORPGs that had a disastrous launch. For FFXI SE gave one additional free month, that's the only partial precedent. There have been PLENTY games out there that had disastrous launches, and plenty games that would have benefitted a ton from what SE did with FFXIV.

So keeping the servers running was accidental to, or a necessary requirement of, not completely shutting down the game. With the creeping, slow, and underwhelming content and hotfix updates since the PR stunt, not much progress has been made.

Creeping and slow? lol. I don't remember one MMORPG that has evolved as fast as FFXIV is doing after release. And I played pretty much them all. Sorry, but you're pretty much detached by the reality of the game.
Are you even playing currently?

You may be correct about giving particular financial info about the game, I'm not a corporate lawyer. I doubt there are laws that restrict a company from saying "We've doubled the size of the dev team." or "We've greatly increased the production budget." Perhaps in limited circumstances some hard data can be given and I doubt, at least legally speaking, that it's delusional to request it. Again, these are unprecedented circumstances due to an unprecedented, devastating failure.

It's illegal for publicly traded companies to give concrete financial information outside of periodic earning calls, because it can be seen as speculation to make the stocks fluctuate.

As for information about the increase of the developing team, that's exactly what they did. They even gave us names and bioses.

[LackingLadyLover]

In response to the title, the game should be much better by the time the other upcoming games you mentioned release. To be honest, not many MMOs launch without tons of issues and a lack of content. It's the norm, not the exception. However, as you can guess, FFXIV is taking somewhat longer to get to the point where it is fleshed out. If I had to take a guess, I'd say the game will be superior to TERA and GW2 by the time those launch. If not, it may take a year or more to become better.