Wards are an interesting idea. In practice however you can't honestly say it's more (or even as) efficient as an AH. You can like it more (you can like anything) but to say it's as efficient is just a lie.

Not being able to view every retainer in a ward due to rendering lag is not acceptable. How is this acceptable. It's not. In FFXI you had the AH and then your gates outside of Juno. AH was the goto get-it-done place to be. How much should I sell this thing for? Let me check out AH history. When you wanted to see some cool bazaar stuff you'd actually commit to walking around the Juno gates and examine 50+ or so players to see what they had. Oh neat, that person is selling that armor for max gil. Oh wow, I didn't know you could get that material for so cheap. There was the AH and Bazaars, both. Both are necessary, neither is sufficient by itself. If XI only had Bazaar lol that would have been awful (lol sooo bad).

Let there be 2 supermarkets in your town: 1 that had everything organized (and nothing was invisible due to lag lol) for quick grabbing, and another with nothing in order. Any busy person is going to the ordered market regularly, and maybe the disordered one on the weekends and days off from work/school. Some people will make the time to go to the disordered one just because.

So yea. If they add a straight AH then MW won't be a pain anymore because it will be optional. I can think of 2 mmo's off the top of my head that have both and buying/selling is easy breezy. Anyone saying "but this isn't 11" is really saying "I want something completely different from 11 just because". If having an AH makes a mmo FF11 then there's tons of FF11 clones out there with no chocobo's or Redmages.