Hm, okay, I think I understand the point.

People aren't literally saying "Port Lumoria or Tu'Lia to XIV", though, they're saying "There should be some kind of crazy awesome area you can get to after you've cleared a certain part of the plot where you can do neat stuff", which... I completely agree with, and I imagine the devs also are on board with, but keep in mind that content-wise right now we're still not even caught up to Rise of the Zilart in FFXI, because of the year of backtracking and repair work that's been going on. Even when 2.0 comes out, we won't be at that point. Which, yes, it's a waiting game, but... (I mean, it's a Final Fantasy game, of course there'll be a place like this. Fifty gil says it'll be floating, too.)

A lot of ideas in FFXI really, really worked! (Like a lot of ideas in WoW really worked.) I think one of the reasons that XIV failed at first is because Tanaka deliberately did things just because they weren't the way XI had done it. The initial idea behind Market Wards was pretty cool - it was implemented terribly though, I still hope we get to do buy orders with our retainers. A lot of other things - battle regimens come to mind immediately - were an enormous confusing step backwards, as has been mentioned.

(Then again I'm the sort of player who thinks FFXI has gotten much -better- over time and stares in incredulous disbelief whenever I hear people talking about the "golden age of FFXI" and refer to CoP-era, even though I have a lot of good memories (some of them good in a masochistic sense) of doing stuff, and I think Yoshida's committed to having some level of content in XIV that presents that level of challenge; there's a difficulty between interesting difficulty, and fake-difficulty-tinged-with-nostalgia, and there's a lot of the latter going around.)