I guess another thing is:

FFXIV could look back to games like WoW or FFXI or it could look to the future and be inventive. Being reflective on the past is good, and like Jennestia says, learning from the past is also good, but being stuck in the past isn't!

I don't mean to play the Guild Wars 2 card, or the ArcheAge card, but there are certain MMOs on the horizon which are being inventive and breaking new ground in the industry.

Looking back to FFXI will not allow the devs to look forward and be creative with content, which the developers of ArcheAge and GW2 clearly were. There are features in both those games which are pretty unprecedented in MMOs.

So looking back to FFXI and fixating exclusively on that can be dangerous for the future of FFXIV if it puts blinders on the dev's creativity.

Fortunately by the looks of some of the stuff coming with 2.0 (like PvP siege and the group summon abilities), it looks like they still have some inventiveness left in them after all. But I guess that's my point. A lot of the stuff coming with 2.0 aren't features from FFXI, and FFXIV is none the poorer for that.