Will Housing ever be addressed in any meaningful manner by the XIV team?

[Dyvid]

Unfortunately 720 new total plots is nowhere near enough supply to satisfy the very real demand for housing on mid/high-pop servers. Drawing from unofficial census data because we'll never get official active subscriber numbers (https://ffxivcensus.com/) there are about 9,500 active players on my server. Once Housing (Shirogane Savage) is released in the 4.1 patch cycle there will be a total of 2,880 plots to be split between FC's and individuals. This means that 70% (2880/9500)of the active subscribers on my server cannot own a house not because of gil, but because of the artificial scarcity. On Balmung, 85% of active subscribers are not able to own housing, again not because of gil but because of artificial scarcity. If its an issue of resources, then scrap Diadem as it is effectively dead content that takes up server space and no one uses.

First I'm not sure why you completely disregard Apartments because they are small but almost identical to ward Houses except they don't have yards and you can't crossbred plants, interior they are the same content. Second is how many plots and apartments are available on you're server? On mine we have few plots from demolish and a lot of apartments, so we have enough to provide the people that want housing. When you add Wards and Apartments together, it's about 10,500 units available after Shirogane is launched. There is only going to a select few servers that won't be able to provide housing to every player in that world.

I spend, and have always spent, the majority of my time when crafting and idling in the housing wards. They are dead of people. I don't see my neighbors, ever.

Just like real life... Seriously though, I would love to see SE add more things to the wards to provide player interaction but SE is stuck trying hard squeeze every last drop to find ways to add more wards without effecting other game content.

You should re-read what I said...I think you missed the part where I said "technically each ward/subdivision is already an instance and the inside of a house is a custom instance." I'm talking about a server dedicated to housing...as in, an entire separate server for each world (but seemless transition to the player) that does nothing but serve up wards and interior instances. Now that I would be willing to pay a tad extra for...

It's possible but comes are a cost. Let's assume SE did this and divided the Data Center up into three parts; World Server, DF Server, and Housing Server. You would have to pull resources from World and DF to feed into Housing. Do you think the community would accept longer queues on the DF until space is freed up to run the instance, or on the World player would be unable to enter a zone because that area has reached it's max amount of players? Bottom line is does the benefit out way the cost?