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).
Well, this idea has failed quite badly then. It works to segregate much more than it works to bring people together.

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.
Coil lockout is very detrimental to the development of social groups for a variety of reasons. These are due to the game design though, not the choices of players. By forming a static people are simply taking the path of least resistance to clear the content.