I think I have an inherent negativity the moment people say 'FFXI had'.

Anyway I think new gear types, new progression and alternate advancement systems could be cool if done well. However if there are alternate gear types I don't want it to mean you have different types of gear for different situations for each class since the storage issue isn't likely to be resolved soon and my bags are already overflowing. Personally I'm not too bothered with 1 anyway as I find incremental stat advancement satisfying.

On 2, I think their efforts with new content like the Sky Island Exploration are at least an attempt to shake things up a bit. The future Materia changes likely will too, particularly in it's effect to make crafted goods more relevant in endgame. It's a delicate balance because if they work on a new type of progression and its unpopular it is going to cause a pretty big hit to content levels and therefore player satisfaction so I understand them not taking huge leaps.

As for 3, as much as I like alternate advancement systems they are tricky things. They can easily make it difficult for new players to get up to endgame as groups will discriminate against people who don't have alternate advancement that gives them advantages in certain content. For balance sake, if they effected things I would say it should be things like harvesting speeds, run speeds out of combat, recovery rates on things like GP or health and Mana out of combat, etc. rather than combat stat or combat ability boosts. Games with progression systems like FF14 naturally have power creep but it needs some measure of control and it needs to not cause the climb to endgame become unreasonable.