Living in an Inhospitable World

[Atoli]

I didn't see where devs mentioned reconsidering monster AI; if so that would be interesting.

There was a request thread about stuff like..more alive NPCs, lively monsters, etc. with over 250 replies in the English speaking forum, but no answer from a community rep, so I decided to ask the same question in the German forums, because the com rep there usually answers very fast, and she said the dev team told her they will try to implement it with 2.0

However, when I was treated like an outsider the second I started interacting with Gridanians, it made it difficult to think of the town as home. I decided to switch to Ul'dah in hopes that the big city would be more forgiving than the tight-knit forest town, but nowadays I feel little connection to my character's "hometown"

I didn't like how I was treated either when I started in Gridania with my first character.
But I had to change servers because of a friend, so my current character is from Limsa Lominsa, and I feel very at home there. I also chose Limsa as my Grand Company, because I feel so very at home here.
Maybe that's why I feel different about your compaints, because it's different in Limsa..?

Plus, we are kind of homeless, Echo-seeing weirdos right now, so the differences between us and the common man might make people wary.

^This!

It's interesting to hear that the tone of the dialogue differs between the Japanese and English versions.
Sometimes I do wonder if the people doing translation and localization have taken some liberty with the original text and added in their own creative vision to what was initially there

For sure this did happen.
In the German forum, there was even a complaint about this because someone felt offended by the way an Elezen retainer was talking (not with much dignity..he was calling her names and tried to make her smell his armpits..).
And because of that we compared the things retainers say in different languages (because many people are bilingual), and we noticed there were no such rude Elezen in Japan NOR in America

How about more elderly, show some older npcs with scars, war torn, drinking at the adventurer's guild and tell stories and pass out cool quests.

There are old NPCs, for example, there's a really old grandma in Limsa Lominsa who wants you to search for her son who has been gone for ages. It's a very sweet story..because it totally fits the image I have of old people who stay back xD