Yeah I really hope that with the Public Companies comes something like campaign, they already got the bare bones of it with Behest now they need to expand it on it, bring in the beastmen, give us a nation/company to align with to earn credit to save up and buy nice rewards. Like you said crafter's needn't be left out blacksmiths could make weapons for our NPC helpers, armourers could make armour for them and so on.

However you will probably get a lot of people saying "We don't want this game to be FFXI", there is nothing wrong with taking things that were good about FFXI and building on them and making them better.