Am I just old fashioned?

[Ladon]

the issues drove players who liked the game away. the game flat out never got enough players due to it being niche with it's open world difficulty.

you can't drive away player who quit at lvl 5 due to difficulty. (or don't even flat out play it.)

I'm starting to get the impression that you didn't even play 1.0. The difficulty in 1.0 was not high in any way. In fact the lack of difficulty drove many FF11 players to return to FF11 after finding FF14 far too easy. There is simply nothing to support your claim that people left the game or never tried it because the open world was too difficult. Could you actually prove an example or two of the difficulties in the open world 1.0 players might have faced that drove them away?