a pretty serious question

[Lemuria]

XI: 5 real life hours being required for the chocobo riding quest.
XIV: nnnnope.

To be fair to FFXI, the quest was at least meaningful, and chocobo's effectively made you invulnerable. Needing to get to Jeuno to begin the quest meant that you had made it past some fairly dangerous territory, which in itself was a nice learning curve for the evade mechanics needed later on.

XI: Being able to access certain areas is dependent on how far in an expansion you are.
XIV: nnnnope.

There are no expansions yet, thus this argument is rather silly. For all we know, you'll need to unlock areas later on when the expansion is released. We'll have to wait and see.

XIV: modifiers, submodifiers, sub-submodifiers requiring gear changes for every skill you use.
XIV: nope.

No, instead we get some vanilla armor with no real bonus to it. Be honest, gear at least had flavour in FFXI. Whether that's increases to various combat or casting skills, direct cure potency increases or massive damage bonuses from the elemental staffs. What do we get to differentiate between armors here? Which one looks nicer... that's about it. Oh, and occasionally you'll have to choose between critical or spell speed.

At any rate, there is plenty of 'Tanaka-ism' going on lately, and it's rather unnerving. The first alarm bell was 'master' crafting and the new level 70 tools. The second was atma grinding and animus/novus. And now we've got NMs running amok and being monopolized by linkshells with radars. If that doesn't smell like Tanaka's FFXI, then I don't know what does.

The NM system of FFXI did not work. As bad as hunts currently are, they're still better than what we had in FFXI.

No, they really aren't. Here's why. FFXI notorious monsters dropped specific loot. Great if you don't have it, but useless if you already do. This meant that some mobs were less appreciated than others, giving people a reasonable chance of trying for most of the NMs. Sure there were a handful of monopolized mobs, usually the so-called HNMs, but they were often few and far between.

Compare and contrast to FFXIV where every single enemy drops similar loot, and gives allied seals which can be traded for things such as oils of time for endgame gear. Now every single NM, regardless of how menial, becomes a target for a hunter. Everything is still furthering their cause no matter how many times that monster is slain.