Square Enix has a vision. It is often in the defense of this vision that causes the most heat with players on the forums and they cause uprage. Yet, you defend some of the very same practices as 'best' games, which, is highly subjective and borderline hypocritical.

But discussion on matters of saying "is there character development?" is subjective, and often very spoilerish. But, in case of point - what happened to the confidence of the Lancer Storyline Antagonist, how did the course of that plotline ultimately effect that character? Because I can tell you the person you presume to see him as at first is not at the end. And there are plenty of self-contained developments at that point.

I can make cases for main characters in the storyline arc as well, at least two are glaringly apparent to anyone. And even the 'filler content' you argue about often has small stories that depict the life changes.

And lets go further beyond that. SE has proved with their first patch that they are not beneath changing even the landscape to have the game's very enviroment develop with the story, let alone the characters. As far as re-playability, again, that is a highly subjective argument to make. Roulette has made DF instance replay-able on a valuable level, as has the changes to Leves.

The quintessential problem here, from my point of view is burn-out. Players who milk the game-play content for its loot value and little else, and then complain when they reach the treadmill portion of the game that forces them to be patient and consistent, rather than obsessive.

Honestly, I was fairly active in MMOs beforehand, but joining the RP community in this game opened my eyes wide to just how much life of the game itself I was missing.