I would like to point out the major difference between the ffxi AH and the MW that seems to have eluded everyone in this thread so far.

FFXI - you don't see what price people are selling items at, only the history of the last 10. This makes it so people almost never selling for less the the last sale in the history. This keeps sellers listing more items and also makes it quick and easy for them to list them. This is know as a Sellers Market.

FFXIV - you get to seee the price of every item that is up for sale, along with its price. This makes it so that people will always under cut the current price to ensure that people will buy their good, it doesn't matter if is undercutting by 1g or 100,000g, its human nature to want to get the cheapest one. With this system it forces people to constantly push down the price of items the only control is the rareity of the item slowing its decent. As someone on page 2 mentioned with the MW system the process of running to the search counter each time to check the current price makes it a slow and painful system (pen and paper does help). This system is a Buyers Market.

Now i'm not going to complain too much about the MW but personally i've not really sold much on it choosing to just NPC most of the goods i make to save myself the trouble of using the system. I remember from alpha to release they worked hard on speeding up the interface with retainers and even after release it make a huge difference. However in my eyes no matter how much they speed it up or how much they increase the number of retainers per ward its not going to fix the economy. To fix the economy they need to make it a sellers market - this will encourage more people to use, common items will stabilise at lower prices with out massive deflation seen with MW, buyers would have to put in blind bids, some times they might get lucky and get a super cheap item othertimes pay more than the last sale. If SE really loves the idea of retainers they should make it a system that works in tendem with the AH for people looking for very quick sales (but this might do more harm than good).