The general player base needs to improve

[Stanelis]

A lot of people that said it was bad largely never even tried it, rather they just accepted word of mouth about it.

It's also popular thought that the game engine/gameplay isn't suited for it, and that's just not true. It could be better, yes. Hell, it WAS better before Stormblood, but if it wasn't suited for it, they wouldn't have added it.

1) most people have tried FFXIV PVP, see that it is awfully bad and never put a foot in such activities again.
2) The game engine and gameplay isn't suited for it (the holy trinity doesn't work in PVP and FFXIV is all about it, and the frequency at witch the server tally the player's movement isn't high enough to provide for smooth gameplay).
3) They added PVP because the most popular games currently are all PVP games that have pro leagues (just take a look at twitch and the most popular games), not because the gameplay is suited for it. It is a (poor) marketing choice (somebody at SE seemingly didn't get the memo that if you're going to have pvp in your game you also need to have a relevant gameplay tied to it).

I mean, FFXIV have some strong selling points (mostly that it is very pretty, the CS are decent and the immersion in the areas is quite good), but PVP isn't one of those.