Update on DirectX 11 client?

[Sheer]

I understand what you mean especially if you consider "because we want to" as a reason, honestly, as I've said before while it feels they took steps forward they took many steps backwards.

Assuming that the development team took away good features "because they wanted to" is rather inconsiderate. We don't know how long those little features actually take. We don't know how taxing those little features were on the game's optimization unless they tell us - for example, like Yoshi-P mentioned in his seventh letter from the producer LIVE:

A: The running animations are already different. As for the fighting animations, if we think about the future classes/jobs that we will be adding, there's a chance that we won’t have enough memory to include all the animations. Therefore, we would like to first focus on stuff like adding new classes/jobs and making preparations to increase the level cap.

Instead of fighting animations, we are thinking about showing each race's individuality via emotes and such. Starting from Beta phase 3, facial expressions will be implemented. Unlike the standard emotes, these new emotes will only change the expression of the character's face. Please note that these new emotes can be used in conjunction with the standard emotes.

In other words, we're constantly thinking about ways to update the game in the most efficient manner so we want to pick the best way to show off each race’s individuality.

[See the question at 1:42:30 for source.]

We don't know how assets from FFXI differ from ARR; how these assets affect performance and push hardware limitations. We could assume that FFXI is better optimized than ARR simply because it's been around longer, but even then, I wouldn't be surprised if they used different programming designs. So how would we then judge "optimization"? Simply by better FPS on weaker machines? Or the relativity between the features and the performance on lower-end machines?

My point is, as players, we're incredibly blind and short-sighted as to what happens from a technical standpoint. FFXIV: ARR is the reason the team working on it gets paid; not only are they employed because of ARR, but a number of the staff also play the game. Why wouldn't they want to make a game they play the best they can?