It occurred to me that one of the biggest reasons I am hesitant to recommend this game to friends is because I realized I won't ever be able to do anything significant with them in game until the end, or until we are working on second jobs.

Being able to level with a friend and not have it feel pointless or insignificant is important in MMO's. In FFXIV the main leveling is done through quests, which WOULD be fine, except for the part where a big part of those quests are instanced, so you're constantly disconnecting with your party in order to go do the bigger parts of the quests. This is really annoying. You COULD just meet up with a friend and go grind for levels, but you're going to have to still do the quest line, which will sync your level down to that quest anyways, so you're technically backtracking, making simple grinding with friends feel like a detriment rather than something fun. So if I had a friend join me right now (and Im only lvl 32), it would seem like a chore to play together until they got up to my level, and even then we would be doing mostly separately instanced stories.

What a bummer!