Lackluster Graphics in FFXIV

[Abriael]

That's not entirely true. Many MMO's are being developed on Cryengine 3 and Unreal and maintain a good level of quality. ArcheAge, Blade & Soul, TERA,and an unamed MMO from CHangyou are some examples of games with excellent graphics. Maybe they aren't to the standard of Crysis as a single player game but they are on par with FFXIV I would say. The engines I mentioned above are also much more stable and run more efficiently than Crystal Tools does. I don't know if you've seen any videos for those games but they don't suffer the same problems as FFXIV do and also have seemless environments and can be run on computers with lower specs than the minimum for FFXIV.

Using an engine instead of another doesn't automatically make for better graphics. Engines can be and have to be downscaled considerably in order to fit a game or a platform, and all the games you listed run on extremely downscaled engine, and feature a much lower level of detail and field of view than FFXIV.
They simply don't push the graphical envelope nearly as much as FFXIV.

Games with absolutely crappy graphics like Magna Carta 2 run on unreal. So no, running on a certain generic engine isn't any guarantee of higher level graphics. Quite the contrary, the more genric an engine is, the more third party companies will have to struggle to adapt it to their needs.
Using the Cryengine won't make the game automatically look like Crysis, and using the Unreal Engine won't make the game look like Unreal. Engines are a basic canvas, but each game requires different specs, enables different effects, and ultimately (besides extremely low budget games) run on a version of the engine purposedly customized for that game's requirements.
Even Crytech games and Epic games don't look nearly as good, in their finished status, as the engine tech demos. That's because even for their main games the actual developers of the engine itself have to considerably downscale the engine in order for it to run on commercially available machines.

Most companies that use generic engines like Unreal or Cryengine do so not because they are necessarily better, but simply because it's way cheaper than developing their own.

There isn't a single word in what Shelia said that isn't perfectly true.