It is entirely possible that this is the kind of thing where Yoshi P and the FFXIV dev team have their hands tied. Square Enix might pocket most of the money from the cash shop and divert it to other projects but they may have promised x amount of the money from sales to go back to FFXIV and SE might have adjusted the FFXIV budget to compensate. I mean, one of the luxury things that some publishers shell out a lot of cash for is a live orchestra for music recording and as we've seen from Fanfest, most of the music is just Soken, his synthesizer, his band and maybe a vocalist.

Also, Yoshi P says that the game has massive databases attached to each character. Whether or not it's the most efficient way of doing what they do is debatable but they need tons of extra server power and storage to keep up with your character savestate, which pushes them way ahead of FFXI in server load.