The main focus was (I'm sure of it) to make us socialize and form strong communities (see the recent interview of Yoshida praising BG's organisation). The major drawback however, is the creation of static parties which, even though they are fulfilling the role of "beating the content", fail hard at the "socialization" part. I'm sure the original intent was to form groups of 20-50 friends who could run the content together (DF searching in all servers, kinda hard to socialize), but the players interpreted the lockout otherwise and made statics.