Why are some wards not allowing purchase?

[Jojoya]

By your own logic, your assumption also isn't really relevant. We're not living in 2006. A laptop at its cheapest could run FFXIV, and it would still be worth less than some of these new consoles that are coming out.

Also, whats with this nonsense about Dynamis being a DC of "Dead Worlds." The whole point of being here is that you can DC travel if needed to do other forms of content. Are these supposedly "Competitive" Xbox players going to care which world they end up on? Not really. The MSQ has duty support if queues do not pop. The only thing they could conceivably miss out on is Ranked PvP. Heres another assumption for you; Xbox players being as "competitive" as we have assumed, will not waste their time on FFXIV ranked PvP, as they'll find its low quality, and not as fun as most other PvP focused games out there. So there goes any reason to dislike starting on Dynamis besides the minor annoyance of having to spend 30 seconds to DC travel.

Dynamis is low population, and it is an OBVIOUS move for them to send all the new players they'd expect to that DC, and they wouldn't know or really care about where they started without having previously researched the game before deciding to play it. If they DID research it, they'll see that preferred worlds get a gigantic experience buff for choosing to play on them. You'd better believe they'll lock down NA servers if an influx of players is expected, as they've done in the past on pretty much every world in Primal/Aether/Crystal.

On your first point - they'd already be playing FF on their cheap laptops if they had them and wanted to be playing the game. We're not talking about how many people would buy a Xbox if FFXIV were released on it. We're talking about how many own a Xbox and would start playing FFXIV if released that aren't already playing the game on a PC. Again not everyone bothers to buy a PC, especially when it comes to games. A large number find consoles more convenient because titles are released to be playable on them as is as opposed to them trying to make their PC match system recommendations for the game. Not everyone cares about having access to mods, which tends to be the only PC advantage when a game is available on all major platforms.

While I personally don't agree that Dynamis is dead (I have characters I actively play there myself), you're blind if you don't see that's the general reputation Dynamis has been given by the community. A large portion of the general gaming community is sensitive to reputation as if they gain or lose status based on the reputation of the game they are playing or the server they are playing on. Think about how long FFXIV lived with that "oh it's a weeb game, no real gamer would play it" reputation in the Western gaming community until WoW tanked in Shadowlands and suddenly content creators were giving it an honest try with their viewers following. The reputation given the data center by the community will impact world choice for those who care about such things. If the Road to 80 is such a strong incentive, why was it being mostly ignored by that massive WoW influx even though world visit was available at the time and initially every NA data center had at least one Preferred world available to choose? No, they wanted to be on the worlds with the 'cool kids".

Even now, there's very strong dislike for data center travel as a way to make having a new world a character's home world despite reassurances from those of us who use it frequently. There's also the fear that data center travel may be temporarily shut down during times of congestion, as the recent Lodestone notice warned players and which is very likely to happen at 7.0 release.

While it's an obvious move to try to funnel all new players to Dynamis for the next expansion launch, that doesn't mean SE will do it. We'll have to wait and see how they handle it when that time comes.

It doesn't pay to discount human nature when trying to predict what decisions they will make. There are patterns that appear among different demographics and some incentives can become more attractive or less attractive when contrasted against other decisions to be made. If FFXIV ever does release a Xbox version, I wouldn't bet on the majority of Xbox players choosing Dynamis over the other data centers unless they have no other choice.