I think something people are having trouble reconciling is 2-fold: For one, CBU3 wrote a bad story. Straight up. And the actual writing from a literary perspective is extraordinarily subpar compared to what we've been receiving for 10 years - even ARR (which, don't put on the grayscale glasses. ARR was actually pretty decent). It's fast-food shonen dribble over-saturated with forced sentiment and unrealistic stakes far surpassing any we've seen up to this point. This coming after we were advertised something completely different. It's really an impressive feat they've pulled off whiplashing the dedicated portion of the player base.

Secondly, the development process is affected by massive undertow. Development of 7.1 was already well on its way when 7.0 released, and it's very likely that the entire story of 7.0-7.55 was already penned up by this point as well (and only needed to be fleshed out). Even if they wanted to do a full 180, it's likely we won't be seeing that for quite a long while. Even worse - the 7.1 story is probably going to perpetuate issues everyone already has with 7.0 which would make changing things even more difficult. Due to SE standing on a financial precipice, Yoshi P is trying to save face by effectively insulting the intelligence of the players by deflecting issues and making statements misrepresenting the concerns of the player base because if he doesn't it could sink the company.

Combine all of this with a complete lack of content to fill the time before 7.2 and it's a recipe for a major financial occurrence within SE. If they're not careful, the business decisions SE has been making siphoning funds away from FF14 are going to finally surface in a massive loss of revenue as players become bored or disenfranchised and end their subscriptions. When operating with a subscription model in place, it's significantly more difficult to regain a discontinued subscription than it is to maintain pre-existing ones, so every lost sub makes recovery from a financial event harder and harder. Throw in typical bad SE business practices and you have the makings of a potential cascade. Of course, one on this magnitude would take several years. Time will tell. This isn't the first time they've been on the verge of an exodus and they honestly don't seem to care nor are they bothered by things currently so we'll just have to see what happens.