The way Square Enix depicts our characters...are we helpless, or are we heroes?

[Abriael]

nah if people can form a behest party or a random SP party then they should be able to team up for story quests as well.
IMO they should have a additional story line with quests for party only.

That's what public quests are, and it's very possible that part of the company gameplay will entail just that. There are many games that feature public quests on the side of single player ones.
But public quests can't support a complex storyline by themselves, as the presence of multiple people restricts a lot the storytelling possibilities.

Simply enough, any complex online storyline needs to deal with the incongruence that the same events happen to the same thousands of people. The only way to deal with that is to make the actual storyline part happen in a vacuum.