I know that people are tired of the "Bring X back from FFXI" threads, however I personally feel as if some things have been removed in an attempt to deliberately and forcefully move in another direction than FFXI, with the sole purpose of doing so and not consider reusing some of the great little features.

What I miss from FFXI is not NMs that took 36 hours to spawn and required 6 people to kill, or spending a year getting my first 75 so I could "start the game for real", or anything big like that.

I just miss some of the subtle tiny little features of FFXI like searching for people from your log, and being able to search for people by name.
Being able to manage people in an LS or a party without having to stand on top of them.
Being able to see which area someone from either my party or LS is currently in and what their current class/job is even if they're not right next to me.

I really get the feeling that some of the small subtle but awesome things about FFXI have been removed to prove that they can turn this game in another direction, and that's fine. I just don't see any reason not to use these tiny excellent features that made the game more intuitive.

I like that FFXIV is not an FFXI clone, and there are things from FFXI that I would hate to see again, but these are features that I miss on a daily basis because they made it easier to gather a party, or searching to see if a friend was online (if said friend was not in your friendlist), and yet they were all optional, so you could just choose not to use them if you didn't like them.

But I would like to hear people's opinions on the matter.