Sympathy is irrelevant, as are opinions. It's the raw numbers that matter. If less than half your active player base is going to get to play your incoming expansion due to lock-out... just how good do you think your next fiscal year's profit margins are going to look?

FFXI's CoP is what choke-held FFXI's numbers to about 500k when it could have had exponential growth like WoW. It took them years to figure out that they just bottle-necked their content so much that barely anyone had completed it.

If FFXIV is truly banking on requiring people to have completed ARR's story to even touch Heavensward, then they're going to have to keep the entirety of ARR's main story at the same sort of learning curve it's been maintaining. Right now, numbers are leaning otherwise.

It doesn't matter what anyone believes, or has an opinion on. This is a matter of raw numbers and how many SE wishes to preserve. If SE followed the desires of only their hardcore or hardcore leaning members we quite simply wouldn't have a game.

If you came into get your car oil changed and fluids topped off, and I told you to 'grow up' and change your own oil, you'd take your business elsewhere. That's effectively what you are telling these people.