Optional Instanced Housing

[Kenky]

They could easily create

Woah now, mister! Do you work at Square Enix? Do you know the technical side of the servers and their engine handling data values?

Because otherwise, you can't really claim it's "Easy" to do this or that.Plenty of people continue to claim about how easy it is to just add more wards, like it's a flick of the switch. But there's a lot more behind-the-scenes that could snap. We don't know how many bails of hay we can put on the proverbial camels back before it breaks.

While making "instanced FC housing" and such would help and the entire shift from all ward to ward/instance hybrid (you get to pick which one you want, with varying levels of gil investments to make it fair) would certainly alleviate most, if not all the issues we have. But even then, more people would prefer Ward-styles to Instanced-styles. Or at least that's the theory, what with people refusing apartments on principle.

(I am aware that Apartments have issues of 'being too small' and 'no garden'. But those issues can't be remedied without an entire revamp of the Apartment complex as a whole.)

[Jojoya]

They could easily create FC-based instanced housing for the FCs so that they can have a private neighborhood for them and their members which would free up slots in regular wards

They could make the plots a universal size and allow people to start with a small and upgrade their house size on said plots as they obtain more money so there wouldn't be mad scrambles for mansions/mediums

They could literally just add wards as the player population increases, even though the ward system is hands down the worst player housing system in modern MMOs

And for people who don't care at all for a player neighborhood feel they could implement private instanced homes where it's just a singular land plot with decorative buildings/scenery/NPCs to give it a nice home feel

There's a plethora of solutions but the stubbornness on SE's part with wanting a "neighborhood feel" and the subsequent fanbase defence of their poorly executed method to obtaining this feel is what will keep the situation from ever improving

Doing what you suggest wouldn't easy. It would mean they would need to completely rebuild the house portion of the housing system from the ground up. That's a significant amount of development time taken away from other things. It would also likely require all players to give up their existing housing (including apartments) as the wards would have to be demolished to make way for the new universal plots you describe.

We know they've been working on technology that could have a positive impact on what housing is like in the future. It was mentioned during the EU FanFest Q&A,

If they get that technology working, it could allow them to add instanced house plots while retaining a negihborhood feeling (so the best of both worlds). But that's still a big if. We don't know what progress, if any, they made on it. Or maybe it's mostly complete and Ishgard housing will be when they unveil it.

(I am aware that Apartments have issues of 'being too small' and 'no garden'. But those issues can't be remedied without an entire revamp of the Apartment complex as a whole.)

I think size could be addressed without any major rework. They could add medium and large wings to apartment buildings. They did say when apartments were added that it would be relatively easy for them to add additional apartment wings to each building if they were ever needed (as compared the problems of adding new wards). Players would probably need to relinquish to get a different size instead of being able to directly upgrade/relocate but that's a minor concern.

What would definitely require a massive rework would be to add gardening function outside of the flower pots we already have. Weather doesn't currently exist in housing interiors the way it does in the open world zones and wards, and the current garden plots are tied to weather. I doubt SE would ever add it to the apartment system.