At the end of the day... the main goal of this game is (And always has been) to bring a Final Fantasy MMO to the masses that appeals to all the people who buy the offline numbered titles
Everything that was done (or wasn't done) was to this end...

Gift is asking a bunch of subjective questions, but I must say, it would be extremely interesting to see Yoshi P answer them....

Honestly though, we don't know how much pressure was (is??) put on the design team.
I bet this is what it sounded like during development

Yoichi Wada: Hey Tanaka, Final Fantasy X is up to 8 million in sales... FFXII did 3 million in the first week.... How many subscribers did FFXI have?

Hiromichi Tanaka: like half a million, but here's the thing... thats not bad numbers for an MMO. People are hesitant about paying monthly fees to play a game

Wada: You're right... no MMO has millions of subscribers.... OH WAIT.....

Tanaka: Very funny.... But I'm just saying... you can't even play FFXI on a slim PS2. It got a bad rep...

Wada: Whatever... look... FFXIII just did 2 frikkin million sales in its first week... IN JAPAN ALONE.... and we let interns write the story.

Tanaka: Well work on FFXIV is proceeding beautifully. The tech demo was very well received.

Wada: That's all well and good.. but I swear to God, you give me FFXI-2 and the next game you'll be working on is "Game Designer Sepeku"

Tanaka: This one will be different. You will see... Come Fall 2012, the world will be blown away

Wada: Yea... about that... I was thinking we should bump that up... to say... Spring 2011.

Tanaka: But Crystal Tools was designed for PSgl, not directX. The networking API is brand new. These things take time..

Wada: You know what I'm hearing from you T-Knocker, Excuses. PSGL, DirectX, MS-DOS 5.1... its all the same shit.. And I know I'm no computer guy... but can't you just use the networking API from the FFXI engine?

Tanaka: No, not at all... even if it wasn't owned by someone else, it was based around much smaller bandwidth needs. This new one was developed by our staff in China

Wada: Yea, whatever. Just get me an MMO that millions of people will buy, and have it ready by Spring 2011. And I am so serious.. If I see an FFXI clone, You're going to be the new custodian at the Beijing office

Tanaka: Fine, it will be released well ahead of schedule and it will not resemble FFXI.

Wada: You know what... make that Fall 2010... I'm feeling generous