Nice fan-fiction

They're not understaffed (just have to check the staff roll), and thus they don't lack budget, and FF16 doesn't impact much FF14, if at all (they're more intelligent than that). The inertia of FFXIV is a conscious and continuous decision from the devs and Yoshida. They panic at the idea of players being "lost", so we have all these shitty quests, the linear dungeons, the shallow game systems, etc. and changing this would lose players, and anything slightly different is very carefully put aside, or even outside, like Eureka, Bozja or Blue mage.