I'm more inclined to think we're the vocal minority, after all we're the ones discussing these things, and not the ones who keep silent. On topic of WoW, I think I remember Yoshida mention exactly what you did, that another WoW isn't happening. They still wanted to take things that made WoW good though, and bring it to FFXIV.

After the disaster the 1.0 version initially was, they simply couldn't afford to experiment, thus they went with the "proven" concept. I don't think that they are unaware that it was both proven to work for WoW, and proven to fail if you just make a WoW clone. And I don't feel like ARR is a WoW clone. Similar, yeah, a clone, I don't think so.