I guess I wasn't aware so many people were struggling to make social connections in Final Fantasy XIV; but I think that it may be that the game allows for a wider demographic of players that could be causing the issue with finding like-minded players.

In Final Fantasy XI, if you saw someone who had made considerable progress in the game, then you knew right off that it was their kind of game and you immediately had something in common with them in terms of play style.

Here, you have some players who are here long-term/hardcore raiders, but also plenty of players who have far less time/can't commit to a weekly schedule for a video game. Because of this, you can't tell if another player is like-minded until you've actually gotten to know them.

I see plenty of people chatting it up in /say in Limsa Lominsa, FCs inviting all ranges of players, and I've been in my current FC since roughly around ARR's launch (and apparently they were around while I was playing 1.0 as well, I just hadn't met them yet), and I'm not even on a locked population server like Balmung, but obviously my observations are limited to the 1 server, so perhaps my experience is an edge case.