I'd like to take an extended break from the game, but...

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Can anyone explain the Cons of instancing this stuff to me? The only one I can think of is it lowers immersion a bit. But the benefits are that housing becomes more accessible and doesn't disappear if you have to go for whatever reason.

The way I see it, a soldier deploying for a year being able to keep their stuff as it was when they left sort of trumps the reasons for not instancing.

There is a potentially major downside, but it comes back to how their instance server code and hardware is setup, something that only the devs know. Back at the game's launch, the game had very few 'instance' allocations, which led to wait times for Amdapor Keep (The one and only dungeon that gave weekly tomes back then till wanderer's palace had mythology added) potentially an upwards of an hour+, regardless of role, regardless if you had a full 4 man party ready to go, simply because there wasn't enough instance allocations to go around.

I can only make assumptions as only the devs know how the instancing works, but assuming their server hardware is limited when it comes to total instances they can allocate, I can assume the choice of 'neighborhoods' was made to keep the total housing instances on each server down to 36 instances (12 wards * 3 housing areas) vs 2160 instances (12 wards * 60 plots * 3 areas for houses that potentially need instances). and once again, just making an assumption, but if every 'instance' reserves itself from a collective 'pool' of instances that are limited, then having 2160 per server being potentially occupied could very well lead to that same problem of 'not enough instance severs to go around'. and that's just low balling it, because with instanced housing, there wouldn't just be a 2160 house cap anymore, a server like Balmung could very well have 20k~ instances needed for its housing.

Instanced housing would solve the situation, but could present a technical and catastrophic nightmare from the dev's side of things if implemented in haste without proper testing, or the proper hardware to handle it.