Housing is a feature.
Just like Duty Roulette is a feature.

But housing is the only feature that is denied to the majority of the player/customer base because they failed to click an object within a few mins of the game coming out of maintenance.
Replace the word housing with other features such as "Raiding, beastman dailies / chocobo license / gold saucer access etc" and it should be abundantly clear to everybody as to why some players are upset.
It's sad how there are people out there who still fail to see this, or erroneously attribute it to player-attitude problems/demands for freebies.