They view the game as a Final Fantasy themepark and have expressed extreme enthusiasm for bringing together the different final fantasy games in FFXIV. I'm not talking about Yoshi-P either; their various designers have talked about this as well.

Their reasoning is that everyone's definition of Final Fantasy is different. If they made it like FF9, people would say it's not like the "true" FF7. If they made it like FF7, people would say it's not like the "true" FF9 or FF10 etc. So their answer is to have isolated references to different ones throughout the game.

I agree that taking inspiration and outright copying are different things. That was part of why the Star Wars 7-9 films were bad. They couldn't tell the difference between inspiration and copying. It seems they aren't the only ones to fall into that storytelling pitfall.

In SE's defense though, if they flat out copy the lore entirely, I tend to think it's so that they can say "here is this boss again, but in 2025 with modern graphics and fast combat". It's a world of difference to how they could make bosses in a 2D or partially 2D game.