FFXIV 2.0 sounds good but...

[SilvertearRen]

It does make sense from a development perspective -- However from a community perspective people will be complaining non-stop so they want to avoid that. This is why I'm not fully hopeful over 2.0 the more I think about the fact we'll retain our data, because that means they aren't fully overhauling the foundation for the better, they're only doing it on a surface level in order to allow us to keep our data intact.

Actually, all of the character data we have are just inventory data, customization data, quest data...all stored information in a database. You just need to convert that data to a compatible format for 2.0 and you're good. The entire backend is probably getting overhauled, but being programmed with an eye on ensuring backwards-compatibility with the old database.

I know this because I've experimented with private servers in the past, and they are often done using emulators that make use of mySQL databases to track all of the appropriate information.