I'm glad that you people share my thoughts, there are so many system error/you can't do this or that in this game that it becomes frustrating after a while.
I agree that the world feels empty/not interactive, while other MMOs got a huge fun world to explore and enjoy.
When people asked for a better open world Square Enix gave us the hunts, well i'm sure that's not what people expected when they asked for making the open world alive.
Hunts are just: wait for call/look for a specific monster, teleport there, kill it in 1 minute, and teleport back to the city or whatever you were doing, exploration is still dead.