Male Viera as a playable character! show your support

[Melichoir]

So it shows that he never saw genderlocking as an issue and the reason that the missing genders in 1.0 were a "must add", according to Yoshida, was the high demand for them.

Wouldnt this imply that there was an issue with genderlocking - a demand for something people wanted and genderlocking runs counter to that demand?

Im not contesting your claim that YoshiP never promised anything, and the reason to add the off sexes was one of demand and pragmatism, but this being said it was quickly apparent that splitting up the races (making only female Viera nad Male Hrothgar, annnnd to switch design gears to include Female Viera halfway through ShB production sched) was probably the wrong choice to make. They ended up including Female Viera at the cost of Female Hrothgar (it was stated by YoshiP that Hrothgar were in Development IIRC well before female viera to give a more 'monster race' niche to help compete against games like WoW - or rather to give WoW players more beastly options) because they said that this would likely be the last chance to add a new race and Viera was still in high demand. What it boiled down to is they tried to do the best of both worlds, and ended up mismanaging it.

Yes, you would get some disappointment with no Viera if you went Hrothgar M/F, but it could be explained that "This is FFXIV and were doing something else." Which is fine. Or you couldve went full Viera, and introduced M Viera but wouldnt satisfy the players who wanted more beastly races.

What they did is reveal female viera, let fan speculation run wild with the use previously established examples of M Miqote and F Roe, and people got super hyped for Male Viera - something that wouldve been a first and in some demand. Only to pull the rug out by saying "Nah check out Hrothgars". It was kind of a wtf moment. they shouldve just stuck with one or the other cause this middle ground leaves a lot of people disappointed and wanting. Particularly considering the issues with customization on both viera and Hrothgar. It was a misstep.

From Yoshida's butt slider response recently, it shows that they do not have an automated way of adjusting clothes that clip with large butts and would have to do that manually. Which is why a simple slider request is hard to satisfy. But if they were to automate these processes so that it requires little to no work when adjusting a gear piece for all races, then we'd not only see male Viera and female Hrothgar, but also other races in the future can be possible if the game still continues.

The unfortunate truth is they need to rebuild the character engine. It was probably in vogue at the time to have the engine operate the way it does, along with saving costs by salvaging it from 1.0, but it is obviously showing the inflexible nature of it now. It might be in their better interests to bite the bullet and just rebuild the character creation engine. It is hyper expensive, but will prolong the lifespan of the game. Cause with each xpac, thats more armor models and gear they need to adjust for, whcih is cost inefficient long term. So it will actually end up limiting how many xpacs they can create or how much they can put into it.