So, I know this is topic has been discussed to death and all, but i thought i'd just share my feelings aswell.

I think the game right now suffers alot from flying alone in the game. Not necessary JUST the flying, but i feel like SE has put the focus on the wrong aspects in the wrong order.
For example, if you fly around in The Fringes just to "take in the environment" or just wanna explore for fun, you'll soon notice that you see stuff the devs are trying to hide from the player, if they were on the ground level. You can see clippings behind "Mountains", Baelsars wall just randomly stops, which begs the questing "Why didnt we just walk around the wall?" and so on.

Also the Texture on mountains and rocks looks so bad when you fly up to them or see them from a perspective you're not meant to see when on the floor level.
you'll also start to notice how extremely barren the lands are when flying. When you first run through the MSQ on foot or on mount, it looks pretty good and you also get the info that this is infact a barren land. But its ok because you're just meant to see some of it. But when you fly you can see miles past the mountains and theres literally nothing there, causing the Barren feeling to change to a more empty feeling.

Also the Settlements in these zones are ridiculously small. Take Ala Ghiri for example.
Its supposed to be a city settlement (I atleast think so, since its not just camps thats been set up, but actual stone houses thats been built) but it just feel like some random place with a few buildings and nothing too it. I cant even imagine anyone actually living there, but there are even families there, which makes no sense to me.

I'd love to see more "life" to these zones, eventhough they're ment to be barren, a few more houses in the settlements or even settlements out of the zone that you cant reach, but you can look at them and get the feeling that theres more to the world in FFxiv other than what you see IN the zones.

Idk, thats alteast my take on the whole world situation atm.