This thread got pointed out on reddit today, and I can't believe I missed this one quote:

FINAL FANTASY XIV was designed to be played in an environment featuring ping times of 200 – 220 milliseconds or less.
This is so blatantly false it's not funny. In 2.0 (when the game was designed), your character status was updated only every .3 seconds in instances. This was eventually changed to .1, but there's no way you can have us believe the game was designed to have a 50% chance of not updating your character for nearly half a second with the way aoe moves were designed in the game. A design of working under 200-220 would have at least guaranteed an update somewhere within that timeframe, while .3 seconds guarantees some of the time you're not updating for a whole round trip of data.