While I believe you speak mostly the truth I will counter a few things in regards to your statements about how XI worked...

1) Kings had a fixed spawn window. Which were in essence a lockout for everyone who didn't happen to get the pull. Non-Kings had 1 chance per day for an entire server population. Kings had a chance to spawn every 4-8 days locking out whatever group did not pull them. Do we want to go back to the days where those with the lowest latency or the better bots controlled the lockouts?

2) Dynamis did in fact have a lockout. A strict 3 day lockout on content that had first 5 then 9 different loot zones. If your zone on your server was taken during your Dynamis period... well you were locked out. (Sure this wouldn't happen in today's instanced content driven world but still...)

3) Sky/Sea were driven by a token system. Most of which were locked out a combination of 1-3 hour spawn windows. If you did not obtain the trigger from defeated the monster or finding the ??? during that window, you were locked out. Sure it was for a much shorter time, but it was locked out.

All in all XI ran off a different system of Lockouts than most modern MMOs. It ran on a system of competition resulting in a fixed number of loot opportunities across the entire server. (And then they were not a 100%)

XIV runs on a fixed opportunity for loot per person. Resulting in a "fair" chance for everyone to loot something per week. While XI's system was imbalanced easily by strong competition.

That being said, the "4 and 8 player only" content locks XIV into a system that is not ideal for long term. Not because it does not allow us to "swap others" in and out, but because of the "single job" loot and the larger job pool brought on by Heavensward and beyond. We need a larger group size, possibly 12 or 16 players. The reason why XI worked even with the sheer number of jobs it had was because of the larger alliance size and the free form content style. The more jobs we get the worse this issue will become. The system needs to be modified and fixed going into Heavensward. (While we are at it, maybe add in Support Classes)