Honestly I'm amazed you stuck around as long as you did. My first MMO was SWTOR, back in the golden age of 2.x, and it has fallen FAR. I was really put off by how the story became clearable with just your autoattack in 4.0. Completely took away all sense of engagement from leveling - the game's strongest point. Left in 5.0 when it was clear the devs had lost all sense of how to manage an MMO. Not surprising to hear that it has somehow gotten worse.

Regarding the suggestion of shared storage, I would be okay with that, but it would need to stop there. I think one of the game's strongest points is the fact that alts are not required. This allows the developers to not have to worry much about account wide progress, so you can actually start fresh with a new character instead of having to create a whole new account to have the true "fresh start" experience like most other MMOs.

I realize I am probably in the minority on this, but I like to occasionally create alts to re-experience everything the game has to offer. I do this with single player games too. The difference is, with an offline game you have direct control over your save data. Delete your save data, clear your cloud saves, and you're good to go. With MMOs it is usually not so simple, if it is even possible. I have been really annoyed at other MMOs to find that there isn't much you can do to have a true fresh start aside from creating a brand new account. It's refreshing to actually genuinely start from square one with a new character in FF14.