That was the whole point of it though. They already said it wasn't going to be instanced housing. They also said it was mostly just relaxing casual content. They designed it so you didn't have to baby sit the island and could just chill there. They've also said they're going to update it every couple major patches so we don't even know what they're going to do with it. I think they were waiting on feedback to figure out where to go from here.

That being said if it's not your cup of tea, then that's fine. Grind for the mounts or glam you want then forget it. There's plenty of other content in the game. As for people saying they wasted resources on this, I suspect we only got this because they reused some elements developed for harvestella, their upcoming FF/Harvest moon style game. They just tweaked it for FFXIV.