Hey everyone - thanks for your replies, nice to get other viewpoints. Also, I will say that I had to cull 1700 characters from the original post so some of the extra nuance was probably lost. Oh well.

Anyways, regarding the 'the devs said not to expect Animal Crossing!' I can't say that I did, nor can I say that I expected much of anything beyond 'an island you get to personalize '. So even that rather modest expectation was not delivered upon. I was also unaware that the Animal Crossing comparison was specifically mentioned - I only read the liveletters sporadically - but if you announce something like this the instant visual and mental comparison is Animal Crossing. So I appreciate that they tried to get in front of it, but that was something of a doomed effort.

Ultimately the problem isn't that it's not Animal Crossing or improved/accessible player housing, but that it's just not fun. If I had at least gotten a charming story out of my pointless and expansive collecting of mats that do absolutely nothing, I still wouldn't have been impressed with the content but I wouldn't have bothered writing up a full sheet of issues about it. Beyond that, it's almost directly opposed to the general gameplay design of FFXIV. Most of the features of this game that fall under this category promote player interaction in some aspect - zone population if nothing else. This removes players from the general world to do a long, storyless grind. And I know they've said they want people to be able to play this game as a solo experience, but things like tribal quests can absolutely do that while providing other benefits as well. There's no charm here, just mindless grinding and a tedious goods market.

This in of itself isn't a problem, and I'm sure there are some people who like this sort of gameplay so by all means enjoy, but development resources are very much a zero sum game. This could have been so many things, but it's Sim Industrial Park. And I do not understand why this was deemed a good way to spend development time.