Interesting topic to bring up.

I am half and half on the races in this game.

When I first heard about them, I thought "Ok, well I can roll a cat girl since I was a Hume in FFXI and I have the chance to change.". As said in posts above, some people may want the familiarity of their characters to cross over. I didn't in this case, I wanted to look at something different if I'm spending my whole Final Fantasy Online career on one character again.

The counter argument. This is supposed to be a separate online game, why reuse the race material? SE can sugarcoat it and say they're "different races" because of a name change, but everyone can see past that and know it's just FFXI races used all over again. The Ivalice world is a good example of looking into different races, you could even look at Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (Lilties and Yukes) or FFIX (Zidane was a Genome, Garnet and Eiko are summoner tribe, Vivi is a created spawn of the Mist, Quina a Qu, Freya a humanoid rat, Amarant not quite sure, and Steiner was the only full time party member that was as human as it gets. Add in multiple other races present within the game too.). Look at all the room there could have been for races in FFXIV and they copied the same set from their last MMORPG?

Personally, I would take new races far over the choice of rolling something different from within the same set from the other game. Again, this is a separate world, why are we reusing material that makes a very large play style affect?