The housing system in this game NEEDS A COMPLETE GD OVERHALL. Complete stupidity....

[EaMett]

On bigger servers it is probably quite impossible to get a house simply by the amount of players on it and the small amount of houses in turn. Time is also not something which counts here. You can barely spent any time looking for a house and just get lucky while the one that looked for it for a long time will lose out. And if new wards are coming you can take a break from work or be home without ever having spent time into getting one and get the nicest one while the other person will be locked out thanks to a server issue.

My server is pretty big, I've been playing for 4 years now and housing has always been full. Everyone I know that wanted a house have managed to get housing in those 4 years. I've seen them not only get one but MULTIPLE either because they moved away then back or because they also needed one for their FC. I've seen them move from small to mediums, from mediums to mansions etc. It isn't easy but it's not nearly as impossible as people like to make it sound. The name of the game for housing is to play it smart not fast. Took me a little while to get one, took said friends less time but they spent more time at it, some even getting one really fast.
Keep track of when SE turns the demolition timers on and off, free up time for when houses might come around, be it expansions or timer turn ons.
When new wards are added: Practice running to the wards, place postit elements on your screen so you can spam click the right teleport, or menu item before it even shows. Level classes with speed/teleport/movement enhancements to go faster, practice with those before the servers go down to make sure you're as fast as you can be and are using your cooldowns and class switches appropriately when they come back up. How many people complain that everything is gone within minutes but never even gave these things a second thought. Of course they're going to lose out.
When the patch hits stay up to download it, get in front of the logging screen 15mn at least before launch, use various tricks to make sure you loggin as fast as possible. Play the logging queue lottery when servers come back up, if you get unlucky and get DCed you might miss out and will have to try again next time, it happens and there are other ways of getting what you want you just lost out on one.

Spend your free time camping available plots. Always go for the least desirable one (so many people complain their prime location was relocated to after they spent hours camping.... You're asking for it). It's a long grind and like any pvp situation you'll often lose out to those who spend more time. You have a job and a life and can't afford to spend crazy amounts of time on this? Then you'll have to pray you get lucky on a house placard spamming (which btw needs to change). That's also why the "lucky" part of your comment is a good thing and not a bad thing. People spending a lot of time at it will eventually get a house even if they lose out to lucky players a few times. People who don't have that much time can still try and get lucky and have a chance at it. If SE changed it for something that rewarded time spent then anyone with half a life would be locked out of the feature completely.

Everyone I know who's been diligent and has pushed themselves to guaranty success have managed to at least get a medium, some have even gotten multiple houses. Short of the placard spamming which is a ridiculous mechanic atm none have had complaints about the system. It's just what it is and they worked around it.

Can the ratio of mansions to small be adjusted? Probably. Can the placard clicking mechanic be improved? Definitely, that's hot garbage. Is housing broken and needs a revamp? No, it's just pvp.

Gardening, FC workshops etc, should NOT be limited as they give people advantages to making gil, or acquiring certain rare items. I believe that if people put in the work for something, then they should be rewarded.

I mean, if you don't spend time leveling your crafters you lose out on making gil like that, if you don't spent time practicing ultimates you get locked out of rare items, if you don't spend time farming diadem/eureka/etc you don't get rare items or gil making opportunities. The entire game is Time to Reward based, you don't spend time getting a house you don't get the rewards. The only difference is that FF14 is almost completely a PVE game so people have a hard time wrapping their head around the fact the Housing is PVP. In PVP you don't get rewarded for spending time on something, you get rewarded for spending more time than others on something (whether it be to improve skill or sum up more points). If anything like I said above, it's good that there's some random component to housing since it doesn't automatically lock out people with less time.

The workarounds for these two systems in particular would be ridiculous - gain access to a friend's garden and hope that they aren't using it, or drop your FC and join one with a house and HOPE that they let you garden (because some officers like to keep access to gardens to themselves) - neither of these options are good.
If people keep wanting to claim that housing is optional content then they really need to separate these two systems from housing so that housing really is just fluff.

Giving someone your components and asking them to do something for you shouldn't be that difficult. Besides it's hardly like people require these features, walk around any ward and tell me how many plots have a garden and how many are growing stuff in theirs. For shits and giggles I ran around mine, 30 plots, 11 with gardens, 2 actually growing stuff.
Like I said, if you need these features often enough that bugging a friend to do it for you is an inconvenience then you likely worked your way to already owning a house. For everyone else it's fluff.

As another poster has said, housing can be a nightmare - on Hyperion, not counting this current couple of weeks while there's a moratorium in effect, but it's virtually impossible for both players and FCs to purchase homes. One home comes up maybe every 2-3 days, which is then heavily camped by legitimate campers, bots, and macro users for the entire duration of the timer. It's not a case of hard work that will win the battle here, just obscene amounts of luck. I did a scout 2 days back and the only houses that could be purchased by players (not FCs) were in the Goblet - 2 smalls with about 5 campers each. All other wards were full to the brim.

See my reply to the previous poster. On Faerie things are the same and there are ample opportunities for people with the available time to pursue it.

In other posts of mine, especially on the housing forums, I have explained that I have a home of my own and one for my FC - hard work was not involved in obtaining either, it was nothing but sheer luck. So I'm here fighting for a better system not as someone who finds it impossible to get a home, but as someone who knows how thoroughly broken the system is. I'm so sick of the "screw you, I got mine" attitude that is so pervasive on these forums.

It's not a screw you I got mine attitude. It's a matter of some people thinking the process of getting a house is difficult (we can all agree on that) but not that bad (ignoring the placard spamming bs), and others thinking it's not good enough.
The devs have clearly stated they're on the "not so bad" side of things, and clearly as you've mentioned, people on these forums seem to also follow that trend.

Even though I think they could fix the stupid placard spamming and things would be good, I'm not opposed to threads asking for more access to the features. But, I definitely don't think asking for instanced housing or a total revamp for the umpteenth time is either productive or even a good idea.