I just remembered something from when I got into open beta!

Now I was testing in closed alpha/beta and only got to see Limsa and Los Noscea at that time. I remembered reading something about "large seamless zones" and thought maybe the zone layout would be similar to how it is in WoW, you have your different areas and they try to seam together as you go from one to the other (I know some of this is crap in WoW, you can clearly see the visible line between areas).

When open beta started and you could see the other areas, I was expecting going from The Black Shroud to Thanalan to see a bit of transition going from a forest to a desert. Nope, hit a zone line and saw instead what FFXI did and you couldn't tell you were gradually going from one region to another.

This isn't quite the same as what we're just talking about with what the world is lacking is detail, but I thought I'd throw it out there.