We can't

[Moonlite]

And I'm not entirely sure why people seem so convinced that Yoshi-P himself

Poster boy who puts himself at the front of everything in this game. You chose to be at the front you get to see the good and the bad. How many other MMO's have you played where you could pick dev team member out of the line? How many other MMO's have you played where anniversary event is a plug for dev team.

Is it his fault, no. Does he deserve the criticism, yes. He has chosen by personal or by taking company pay checks to be the face. Game devs don't need to be a focal point of the community.

Long story short, because we don't know how the game works internally, the community that asks for these things often vastly underestimates how much work they are asking for. Some of these things entail fundamental and far-reaching changes to the game, which would require a huge amount of testing and optimisation to maintain the quality to which we have grown accustomed, and all this while continuing to deliver new content at the same pace. It's not like the development team finished 4.1 a month after Stormblood released and is now just twiddling their thumbs and loafing around before they start on 4.2.

Long story short other game MMO's seem to manage certain design functions. No one has asked for stuff that isn't mostly basic feature in other games. Other games that do not have a monthly sub plus a cash shop. If someone asks for something not running in another MMO tell them SE is not an innovator and to be realistic.

While we haven't seen 4.1 yet so can't judge yet a lot of 3.1 should have been 3.0 expansion pack. Not finishing a bunch of stuff and putting it into X.1 doesn't make the cycle look that great. If you step back and look at it from other MMO expansions. They still release content faster but if you look at what you get with 4.0 and then down the road it doesn't look nearly as good in comparison.