Lore and story are nice, but the sidequests as they are are dressed up WoW quests. That's fine I guess, but if so, they should give rewards like WoW quests since they seem to take the same amount of effort to complete, and the same amount of effort to implement for that matter.

I would rather a bit less focus on the dialogue on these minor quests if it meant more sidequests overall, as well as more resources devoted to both the main story and more elaborate, big ffxi style cutscene quests. These would ideally be less about just running from point a to point b, and more about defeating several different types of enemies (or boss-types!) in succession. And I hope those big ffxi-style cutscene quests would have sizable unique rewards associated with them, which often wasn't the case in ffxi.