The whole "future content will be instanced" comment is in response to people who have concerns that the claiming system will be like XI in that it will cause a lot of competition for spawns. Keeping it in that context it hardly means "the death of open world content" it is just there to assuage fears that all content will be heavily competed.

FFXI did the exact same thing and never abandoned open world content. We have an open world dungeon coming in 1.19, we have open world NM's coming in 1.19, and we have a high level open world "dungeon" coming in 1.2, with more planned later.

You people need to stop overreacting over translated Developer responses to arguments in Japanese which you do not understand and then twisting it out of context with everything the developers have laid out for their actual plans for this game.