It's a complex topic. After all, they decided to make a whole new game when the best choice was clearly to remake FFXI, which has a fantastic atmosphere but runs on an obsolete engine and overall lacks modernity.
It would have been easy to make it almost the same, then tweak single features bit by bit....

Instead, without having an extensive experience with mmorpgs, they decided to make a new game as they saw fit, following some evidently wrong and arbitrary ideas. They cannot transform it into FFXI-2 now, so they gotta deal with making it new while still nailing the atmosphere old FFXI players are asking for.

It's pretty hopeless, imo.