Actually the basis of subscription-based gaming is investing. In that over time, the more money you put into it via sub payment, the more content the developers will put out for you to enjoy.

Whether it's a proportional amount, that's a different story:

- An Entry payment of $13/month = $156/year, or the equivalent of two and a half brand new $60 games from Gamestop. This content drought alone from the release of HW to November's 3.1 update costs you at the minimum of $65.
- So purely from an investment point of view, is this content drought really worth the equivalent of a brand new $60 game? That right there is the basis for people unsubbing.


As for the OP's dilemma, the housing situation has it's pros and cons. For the people who are willing to ride out the minimum $156/year, yes they are being rewarded with more housing opening up for their own use.
That is the only Pro...
For everyone else who doesn't sub month to month and waits for big chunks of content to run through (like doing all of 2.2-2.55), they're out of luck, and probably killed the entire housing portion of the game for them.

And worst of all, this does nothing to actually open up sufficient housing for everyone.
For more fun math, lets assume every single player had enough gil to afford a house, but they lost the house after their month of use. So a 100% reclamation system:

Population of Hyperion (estimated): 30,000 players
Number of Plots available per server (estimated): 1500

30,000/1500 = there are 20 players for every one plot available in Hyperion. Divide that per 12 months, and you will be waiting 1.6 years for every player on Hyperion to have accessed housing content. And that is assuming every single plot owner has their house relinquished every month. Meaning you probably will never touch a house, even with a 100% reclamation system, which obviously will never be that high percentage due to players actively subbing.
A more pessimistic estimate would be more of a 20% reclamation, which leads to every player on Hyperion having accessed whatever they want to do with housing (coloring chocobos, gardening, race chocobo raising, airships, etc) after 8.3 years.... after which you've paid almost $1,300 in subs

Yeah, quite the investment.

Had they done housing as 100% FC-based, then housing would have no problems. There would be enough housing for every player, since every FC could afford one. But I'm sure players would rather play Neverreap a million times and their Zetas and Dreadwyrms stripped of their character than to lose their personal housing now.