The disapointment that is Alexander

[Kazama]

It's not, but we can do this all day

It's not, it's worse.

What FFXIV has taken from WoW:
Vertical progression of replacing gear every few weeks/months for higher ilvl.
Standard cookie cutter UI and combat mechanics.
One single progression path for endgame content.
Cross server Dungeon Finder.
Hand holding quest system that leads you to your objectives.

I'm not saying other post WoW games also didn't copy these formulas but in some of those cases, it wasn't the primary mechanics of the game. What SE didn't copy they actually did rather well. By that I mean story and.... story? They did literally nothing new in FFXIV, nothing, not a single new or unique thing in the MMO genre. There is no reason outside of story to play it over another MMO and actually plenty of reasons not to. Broken features like housing and PvP are enough to dissuade a lot of players as it basically means your only side content available is chasing minions, mounts and glamour. There is virtually 0 open world content outside of gathering and crafting which do nothing but maybe make you some money to spend on nothing because again, unless you're chasing minions and glamours there is nothing to even buy. Housing was their attempt at a gil sink and even that they screwed up.

You can defend and argue your point til you're blue in the face, fact of the matter is, XIV is incredibly shallow for a game already in it's first expansion. By this time in XI there were 100s of things to do that would progress your job/character that were not just cosmetic or related to leveling another job and that is why it is always used as a comparison to what should have been it's successor not it's bastardized illegitimate child. They had the entire foundation of 1.0 and years of feedback from legacy players in addition to the two years of ARR to do something new with Heavansward and it ended up as an identical repetition of ARR.