Quite agreed that being held up by a ankle-high fence is pretty dumb! I facepalmed along with everyone else. There are solutions besides 'jump button' for that, though - either make fences realistically high, or allow people to pass right through them (this second solution is what they're working with now, although they've openly stated it's a stopgap and I'm curious as to how they'll handle this in 2.0. Possibly just by not putting in any freaking terrain blocks that are visibly small-enough-to-jump-over, that's how I'd handle it.)

My main /gameplay/ problems with jump involve PvP (and it'd be fairly simple to just turn off jumping in PvP, I imagine, although people seem to think that jumping in PvP is a feature, not a bug, which... ymmv, I suppose) and auto-follow (if you're constantly having to jump to navigate a zone, it makes auto-following someone really tough, unless they change auto-follow to also auto-jump when appropriate.) There are workarounds for all of these issues!

When people think of FFXIV, do they seriously go "Oh, right, that's that game where you can't jump! How lame"? I mean, Twelve know the game has deeper more serious problems than that even as of 1.19, so...

It just seems to me like there's no compelling reason to want jumping to exist in the game other than 'it would be cool!', which: is a perfectly valid reason, I'm kind of 50/50 on it myself, it'd probably lead to more visually interesting zones! It'd also probably lead to airwalls and falling damage and obnoxious stuff like that. People seem to be operating from a baseline of "Jumping is the devil because I say so" or "Jumping is absolutely necessary in a modern MMO because I say so", and I think we'd be able to give the devs better input as a community if we were more careful to actually think about why we do/don't want jumping, instead of basically treating it as a holy war or something to be Angry On The Internet about, as I think this is one area where the devs are closely looking at the forum feedback in terms of "Should we implement this in 2.0 or not?".