I don't see any reason to defend the decision to lock FC content behind the housing market. It follows:

1. SE has known for a long time that there is a major housing shortage problem on high population servers.
2. SE implements airships as the product of FC housing.
3. FC airships take time to build and develop.
4. SE locks exploration's Hard mode behind FC airships.
5. At the time of exploration's implementation, they implement the house decay system.
6. The house decay system kicks in a month and a half after the content has been out in a best case scenario.
7. FCs that get a house as a result of the house decay system won't have three airships up and running for Hard mode until 2016.

They should have done the following if they were going to lock FC content behind FC housing:
1. Implement new housing areas.
-or-
2. Implement house decay system with the launch of the expansion so that houses would be available well ahead of the content requiring house ownership.

Or, still, they could have made an option for FCs without houses to build an airship through Ishgard itself or through Cid's workshop. Instead, we have the worst of all possible choices. That is my major issue with this. Saying "you can take steps to solve the problem by begging other FCs to take you along, merging with FCs, etc." completely undermines the entire point of the Hard mode version. It's FC content, and no one should have to merge FCs or start splitting FC members into subgroups to run with other FCs because SE gated it behind housing and couldn't implement an option for FCs that don't have a house when they've known about the housing problem for such a long time.

For the record, I'm in an FC that doesn't have a house. We have the members to run the content, but we, as an FC, cannot do the FC content because of the arbitrary housing restriction. If we can snag a house on the day the first house collapses, great; we'll be able to do the FC content as a FC in 2016 when 3.1 is at least a couple of months old at that point. That's just ridiculous.