This is what you're paying for:
1. The ability to keep leveling your character to max. (rank 50)
2. The ability to build yourself a nest egg.
3. Access to quests, storylines, missions, and even game zones and areas that may no longer exist in FFXIV 2.0
4. Lasting friendships and companionship from others who like you went a year without homes,auction houses, mounted steeds...etc.
5. The opportunity to get REALLY use to being a Male Lalafell only to wake up one day upon the release of FFXIV 2.0 to be talked into changing into a Female Roegadyn...try explaining that to your friends at the first linkshell meeting post 2.0.
6. No MMORPG is ever finished...to use that as a reason not to pay is silly. This genre of game is designed to be 'never-ending.' As to the 'issues' SE really has fixed the majority of them that they are workable and not nearly as glaring at this point...and continue to fix them with each patch.

Lastly: If you went to the store and bought another non MMORPG game new it'd probably be $60.00ish. You'd probably get about 60 hours of gameplay out of that game assuming it was a good game. (so a $1/hr ratio) Even if you bought the CE edition of this game at full price, (somewhere around $80.00 if I remember correctly) SE has charged you nothing else to play the game for over a year. Most active players have well over 80 hours of gameplay invested. So you got a hecka deal.
Or another way of thinking of it: If you will average over 15 hours/month playing this game then you should be paying for it. If you think the game is crap, then you should ask yourself why you are playing it free or not. Free doesn't make it 'better'. But if you play the game at least 4 hours a week on average, then yes, you must like something about it, and SE deserves to be paid for that.