What you have to understand is that a lot of the potential FFXIV players are FFXI vets. Most of these people want a game similar to XI in that they want challenging, full scale content that requires a good deal of effort to get to and complete.
I, personally, do not like the whole dungeon idea. I want things like: Gather pop totems for the gods that cause a king of gods to pop in a certain area.
Or, Uldah has been overrun with Emperial forces, repel them (actual enemies please. None of this caravan crap.)
Hmm...other ideas.......Ah, open world areas that require playing through a chain of quests and acquiring story to actually get to. I joined "market" FFXIV 2 days after it was released due to the server constantly being down on release. When I got in, one of the first things I did was run to every area possible and get all of the teleports. I shouldn't be able to do this. There should be areas that I can't get to without fulfilling certain requirements (and no SE, I don't consider current level to be a requirement)