To add to Circonflexe's point, the great problem that is persistent with FFXIV and its official social platforms is that the only way to give feedback to the dev team is, as we're regularly reminded of in PLLs, through the forums. (or through a rare JP stream of Yoshida playing with some randos and answering 5 questions)
Regardless of the topic of this thread, looking at the state of the EN forums, we all know how well that's going.

Granted, I haven't played every other MMO or social game on the market, so I'm not aware of what the average practices are, but at the moment I play 2 free-to-play social games for which I haven't paid a cent, and I regularly receive surveys asking me what I think about the latest content, if I'm still engaged with the game, if I have any suggestions or complaints, etc. One of these games launched last December, and I think last week was the 6th survey we received.
6 surveys. In 4 months. And even outside those surveys there are still multiple other channels for me to convey any feedback I have.

In 8 years of FFXIV I received one (1) survey, maybe 2. The survey asked me what my favorite minion and mount was, so that they could display a very cute ranking of everyone's favorite minions and mounts for the 10 year anniversary PLL. That's it.
To add insult to injury, you need to have an active subscription to post on the forums, that is you have to pay to be able to give feedback.

And then when you arrive on the forums, the only official mean to communicate your requests to the dev team, your feedback is immediately torn to shreds by other players who feel the need to express their opinions on the matter. Not only is this adding oil to the trashfire that have become the forums, salt in the wounds of players who just want the dev team to consider their feedback and never asked for anyone else's opinion, and a general sense of nihilism and pessimism both in and outside the forums regarding the forums, but also, from a purely logistical point of view, it's making it impossible to accurately gather genuine and measurable player opinion.
How the hell is this supposed to work?

The EN forums have become a trashier version of Reddit, where people use clickbait titles to post yet another thread on Dawntrail's story or content or job balance when there's already more than 36 threads about it, drowning other threads that are making legitimate requests that have been completely ignored by the devs for 9 months.
Regarding the graphical update, the JP forums have had similar challenges, but thanks to a stronger etiquette and more present and active moderation they have at least managed to branch off and keep a "request" thread separate from a "discussion and opinions" thread (although we still don't know which thread the devs have been looking at).
Naturally this would have never worked on the EN forums for reasons mentioned above, and for having regularly invaded the JP forums since last April and looked at JP blogs and social media, I can say that they are just as disillusioned as us when it comes to the dev team paying attention to legitimate player feedback posted on the forums (like, they think the devs are listening to the EN forums, while we think the opposite).

It's just not working (except for the people who get a kick out of replying to every thread, or out of posting a new thread every day, it's going great for them).
And I've reached a point where I think that, while originally the forums were intended to work as a bridge between the dev team and the playerbase, now the latter has grown into something that SE is not capable of managing anymore and the forums' new purpose is to deter and act as a safeguard for players to dump their complaints, so everything negative is safely kept contained within the forums while they can keep advertising to new players without worrying about bad press.
That or Yoshida, who said something along the lines of "this goes against my philosophy, but I was left with no other choice" when introducing the long awaited and requested improvements to the blacklist and mute features (which have existed everywhere else for 10+ years), still genuinely believes that the forums are a place where players are capable of moderating each other and ⋆⟡₊⊹ freely exchange in the marketplace of ideas ⊹₊⟡⋆ to achieve a consensus in their feedback, which is equally worrying.