People saying 3.5 months is a long patch time are vastly off-base. A major patch every 3 1/2 month for a game as big in content as FFXIV is sort of insane and I'm shocked that they're trying to keep that tempo. I agree with the others that quality will suffer -- in this instance, we have a direct example of quality suffering (incomplete races, no headgear, etc). This quality hit will only get worse as time goes on, if they stick to 3 1/2 month development cycles.

As a game gets bigger, the time between major patches should increase also. When you make a nonlinear change in the game, you have to check everything out and quite often change lots of minor things that were developed before.