So what I gather now is that nothing has changed;

- People are still evangelically spreading the gospel of how things should be run without realizing it's only an opinion and not some law or the word of some god.
- A few people continue to question the opinions of those that oppose the idea [of cash shops], but are met with the same baseless replies.
- No one really seems to realize that the architecture for a cash shop was created with the launch of 2.0.
- The original topic still continues to be ignored because "it's wrong!" to begin with.

The Mog Station was created with the explicit idea of micro transactions in mind. The developers could have left the payment service as it was with account.square-enix.com, but they decided to create a whole new site dedicated to transactions for FFXIV. This tells us that extra services through micro transactions were highly considered at one point and the expansion of which is more than likely to become a reality at some point.

Any successful P2P MMO quickly becomes a cash cow and it can be milked in more than one way; companies understand this, but history shows us that it must be done carefully. OP wanted to know which ways were acceptable and got a few good answers, but a lot of nonsense as well.

I still continue to want to see more replies to OP, but doubt that will happen at this point. It is an honest question and I still agree that cash shops can be done in a way that does not negatively impact the community on a notable scale; has it been done so before? Yes, but not by many.