The Case for Instanced Housing

[Stanelis]

The original housing was released in 2.1 and then opened to individuals in 2.38. That doesn't leave much room for design and implementation. Odds are they never left the drawing board with it, or scrapped it from the start because they weren't pleased with the design.
And the devs have gone on record saying that they made housing difficult to get by design. The whole "sense of accomplishment" and "showing off your homes" memes originated from these comments, way back when.

No, Yoshida never went on record to state that the housing was to be difficult to get by design. However, they did state at the beginning that the current housing implemented in FFXIV was originally meant to be for FCs only, hence the "high" acquisition cost (for the days) of the plots (every FC member was supposed to give something to buy a plot). They did state before individual housing was scrapped, and before allowing individuals players to buy FCs housing plots, that the individual ones would have been more affordable. If the intent was to make housing "diificult" to get, then they would have increased the plots cost (due to inflation), which never happened. Also, a very large portion of the game is based on housing, with a very large amount of items being related to housing. It simply makes no sense to state that housing by itself was meant to be exclusive. The only reason it is so is because they opened a housing that was designed for FCs only to individual players, which wasn't the original intent.

I know it very well as I write articles for FFXIV on a website and have been following every interviews since V1.0.