What do you think about item pop NM's?

[Jinko]

People are so caught up on what XI did.

Thats all you needed to say really, but totally agree.

and for the record, WoW is not a viable point of reference on these forums.

Funny, seeing as one of the interviews referenced WoW being one of Yoshi-p's favourite MMO's, you mean its not viable because you either haven't played it or don't like it.

It only takes a few dungeon runs where someone gets told sorry have to wait to cycle you in... then they sit for 30-50mins waiting for the run and get really really pissed.

This can be a problem and my guild suffered from this in WoW, but then we realised (fairly fast) that you don't need to have just one team doing this content at one time, so we made a second team, which helped when we wanted to 25 man content also as they just merged.

Same can be done in FF14 it would make a lot more sense to take 2 LS teams to the strongholds wouldn't it ?

Alone WoW's endgame format is bland and boring,

I don't see this at all, granted WoW's end game is very quickly completed but its anything but boring, especially considering how Blizzard are so fast to pump out new content to keep people entertained, sure the same rinse and repeat gameplay gets boring after several years but as it does with any MMO. (yes including FF11)