Honestly I never understood the housing thing. I guess people try to apply real world principles to an MMO with their values but it does not work in practice. The history that WoW or other MMO's show is when you make housing super easy and convenient the rest of the MMO empties out and people think it has died as people do not gather. They would have to remove so much from housing and make it so inconvenient to prevent this that people would complain that housing was now pointless and boring.

No MMO developer has ever really solved this and the ones that thought they did ended up regretting the decision to cave to the playerbase. If there is one thing that could derail the FF14 hype train it would be this scenario.