Oh I'm sorry i didn't realize I was talking to a business expert. Where did you get your degree? Is it relevant to the game industry? MMOS? Please elaborate, I need to know your credentials to assume that your knowledge is at all credible.

So list out all the pros and cons for vertical progression, and guaranteed that i've already explained in this post why I prefer a more horizontal method (not at all speaking exclusively). From a a total amount of options/diversity perspective.
She listed several pros. Try to think of the average MMO player. SE is not going to cave to the requests of the hardcores, because they don't make up the majority of the MMO crowd.

I still have not seen pros for horizontal progression laid out in an unbiased manner. Obviously Auction Girl likes vertical. She has listed actual unbiased arguments for it though, as have several others. The only thing I see from horizontal people is, "XI did it so it's fine." XI also had several problems, which just about every person arguing for horizontal has admitted.

I think too many people are looking at this strictly from the perspective of XI and not looking at it objectively. If you increase level caps gradually over the game's life, endgame is not going to be tuned to take forever like it was in XIV. You might have rare world spawns, but it's not going to be the defining factor of endgame if content is tuned correctly, and they certainly won't be on the BS spawn timers that they were in XI. This means that you will not have to grind for possibly years to obtain your gear. Sure, your feeling of accomplishment might be lower than it was in XI, but let's actually think about this for a minute. I don't play a video game to feel accomplished in life. I understand having accomplishments in a video game and being proud. I'm not saying you shouldn't have anything to feel proud about. I'm saying too much emphasis is being placed on that feeling of accomplishment in comparison to your real life, at least in XI. I played XI during highschool and part of college. I freely admit that I had no life in highschool. XI was my escape. Yes, it was quite an accomplishment getting all of that gear that I spent months of /played to get. Fast-forward 8 years and I, along with many who started on XI, simply do not have the time anymore. We have grown up, we have real life issues to deal with, and our number one priority is not to go slay some dragons for the 100th time to make sure everyone has every possible drop from that dragon.

You can easily have hardcore content that doesn't require years to complete. Why anyone wants a system like XI's is beyond belief. I am not left in the dust in other MMOs, because I do not -have- to complete every single raid if I can't log on for a couple months. I can go pick up some newly released gear that is an upgrade and catch up to the hardcore players. This wasn't possible in any timely fashion in XI. It punished players who started late. Need something from sky? Go pull some teeth from linkshell members until they finally come help you, if they're not too busy doing new content which totally "doesn't" make this place you need gear from look out-dated in the least.