What is everyone's problem really?

They directly take Crystal Tower and other stuff from previous Final Fantasies.
Why would you exclude FFXI from that list, although I don't think they should copy 1:1 if they did.

FFXI had awesome versatile content, which also was cause of the way the progression worked. It was very horizontal.
Get your Byakko's Haidate from Sky, Homam from Limbus, Torques in Sea, Relic with Dynamis/Gil and AFv2 from Dynamis, D Ring and Ridill from Faf/Nid. etc etc
You had to do everything pretty much, nothing was meaningless.

In most other games including FFXIV it's like: Ok, you've reached the endgame, now do this dungeon and you get all your best gear. And then you're simply done.
And it gets really repetitive and boring really, because you'll always run the same content over and over.
Then when a patch hits you will abandon that content and move on to the next, replacing all your hard-earned gear.
It feels... kind of like all my acomplishments go to waste when the gear i got becomes 2nd rate stuff.
That's the actual issue imo.

And personally i'd like some kind of competition between Free Companies like HNMs.
It seems rather liveless atm, and FCs mostly keep to themselves not caring about anyone else on the server.

Btw... to ppl saying this is FFXIV and not FFXI, that's true, but just take a look at the races.. orz