Lackluster Graphics in FFXIV

[Elkwood]

BORING...............

[Diraco]

I've been playing XI since 2004, and all the things that annoyed me about XI's graphics have been carried over to XIV (except one, self-shadowing):
Lighting/Shadows:
-Environment doesn't cast shadows. This such an obvious thing that I can only assume it is an artistic choice.
-Only one lightsource produces shadows

Physics/Water:
-When it rains, nothing looks wet
-Walls, floors, characters, etc. are not solid: Weapons and character appendages can be seen moving freely through the ground, or other characters. Hair on characters slides right inside shoulders, etc.
-weightlessness: characters float in midair when stopping on uneven surfaces, characters running along above ceilings in caves, and rubberbanding through midair when getting knocked back

Additionally, even though XIV's character animations are nice compared to XI's, There's no variation to account for the environment, such as standing on sloped ground or near obstacles. Transitions between the recorded (motion captured?) animations are glitchy.

To be fair, most of the above complaints are basically impossible to fix without adding 10X more processing power than what's available even at the top of the line at the moment. The problem is, if you go by XI's track record, Square will not make any significant upgrades to the engine.
It would be nice to imagine that they will add DX11 (or beyond) features to the engine years from now, but it's been about 10 years since they finished development on XI's engine, and so far all they added was a windowed mode, even though the game runs increasingly poorly as new graphics cards/drivers/operating systems are released.