Honestly I think the anti-instantaneous airship crowd picked a losing argument by saying it sacrificed immersion. It's a crappy argument. The simple argument is that it makes the airships utterly pointless. Why not just add a teleportation NPC in each adventurer guild. It'd save development resources. I think the better argument is simply this: if the airships are going to be implemented, they should be content that actually serves a purpose, rather than being content that wastes development time/effort and is only there to do what a stock NPC model placed anywhere in the city could do.
Agreed. If you are going to do something, such as boat or airship, it should offer more than just staring at the scenery. Luckily for us, they are doing that. And, while I doubt very much they'll do it, I kind of hope they offer a few "travel packages" that players could choose. Something along the lines of a basic trip which is just scenery, adventurous with random mob spawns, or dangerous with chance of Imperial Airship battles or airborn nms. A pipe dream, I'm sure, but it would be nice.