Why not just add instanced housing?

[SokiYagami]

I have this impression that the current housing system was a mod of a half-baked 1.0 architecture which didn't managed to see the sun due to the mountain of problems. Then now it's set in stone and yoshi and gang are lacking the resources (thanks to budget constraint) to overhaul the entire housing system.

[Niwashi]

Because that was already answered on the first page: "Finally, I’ve seen a few posts on the forums saying housing would be better if it was instanced like inn rooms are, so I want to point out that instances aren't saved. Nothing in an inn room needs to be saved; player housing, on the other hand, necessitates personal save data for things like furniture placement and character location. So, it would really amount to adding more land anyway. - Yoshi-P"

It already saves housing data from the current wards. They're usually kept online 24/7, but they're shut down, saved to a database, and then reloaded from that data when needed. (Currently that only happens during server maintenance, but that it can ever happen means that SE has already coded for it and set up that database.) With individual instancing, that same pattern simply happens more often, saving processing on the servers by making them keep only currently used houses loaded rather than all of them. At any given time, only a small percentage of houses are actively being used, so instancing them saves the server from having to keep handling all the rest of them. The rest are just a negligible few bytes in a database until someone enters them again.

[Sovi]

Ancient Alien Experts would tell you FFXI is getting a grand finally same day as out patch as a *wink-wink-nudge-nudge* to FFXI players to gtfo so FFXIV can re-purpose their servers.