After battle update -- Overhaul UI?

[RedAffinity]

I can tell you that coming from FFXI with the PS2 and PC versions, Square-Enix believes firmly in equality and everything being even. So if there are any differences, it'll likely be subtle, but don't expect a drastically different UI for PC giving any one platform an edge over another makes for an unfair balance.

With that said, the menu system does need to be overhauled. While somewhat fixed, it's still VERY slow, and unnecessarily complicated. The on-screen hud looks perfectly fine. there's room for improvement so I can't say it's perfect, but it's been a highlight being able to custom make the way my main screen looks.

[Rowyne]

I can tell you that coming from FFXI with the PS2 and PC versions, Square-Enix believes firmly in equality and everything being even. So if there are any differences, it'll likely be subtle, but don't expect a drastically different UI for PC giving any one platform an edge over another makes for an unfair balance.

Tanaka, of all people, admitted there should have been dual UI's. And that the reason it didn't happen wasn't due to limitations or balance, but simply time constraints:

As Tanaka put it, many of the issues boiled down to the team's inexperience with catering to the PC audience ahead of the console market. "FFXI started on the PlayStation 2 and then got released on the PC half a year later, which was a pretty smooth process," he said, "but we're going the opposite way and starting with the PC this time, which created new problems. We placed too much emphasis on making the game compatible with console controllers, so it's just not suited well for mouse control -- that was a huge issue with PC gamers. There really needed to be two different control schemes for console and PC, since both users interfaces work so differently from each other, but our development team didn't get around to that. Fixing this is one of the top priorities we'll be dealing with."

Source

I could have sworn Yoshi-P also mentioned this may be in the list of future plans, but I'm still combing through interviews and old Producer Letters trying to find it.

Regardless, I know that Yoshi-P said they plan to deliver on the promises made by the previous dev team (and Tanaka said that fixing this issue was one of their top priorities). So I'm not giving up on seeing this come to fruition.