What does Heavensward actually bring to the table as an expansion?

[Evtrai]

That was part of it. The difficulty of the game also made it non-player friendly. Losing exp when you die, leveling up seperate weapon skills in order to be proficient with a weapon, no map until you actually got the key item for it, etc. It required tons more work and in order to be a good player, you had to do TONS more grinding than in XIV. Definitely not new player friendly, especially later on when the content kept piling on and leaving new blood in the dust. It became a game where it was more attractive to the hardcore than new players.

You're right that people are more rebellious nowadays, untrusting towards their fellow player and why systems like the duty finder are required. Because of their change in policy, they are actually making more of a profit now than XI ever did.

Look at 1.0. That was done with the spirit of XI in mind and look how difficult it was for casual/midcore players. So much so that 1.0 flopped HARD.

1.0 failure was built around the plain and simple fact that the engine SUCKED it used an engine designed for a console non mmo game, there's no other explanation, people instantly turned away the moment that when you opened a map, it took forever to load, the maps were copy pasted of one and another the areas were barren the maps bland, it took like 6 seconds to unsheathe your weapon, and if you sheathed it by accident, well crap. It was such a chore of unresponsiveness just to sell items They have ABSOLUTELY NO relation that they tried to copy FFXI, what they did copy about FFXI, was the core game release on japan, and they thought they could get away with all the issues, when nowdays the market isn't as forgiving when a company makes mistakes or a game has technical issues. And well sadly in the case of 1.0, first impressions matter, people quickly quit after just the first day. Along with some other problems, but these, were the ones that made people abandon the game since day one.