Why not borrow the good parts from FFXI?

[Critical-Limit]

A) You sucked at it. You were a ween who'd hardly played an MMO let alone an online game and didn't fully understand the constrictions the medium possesses, and...

Condescending. The reason difficult mobs don't work is cuz
1.) Ilvl increase
2.) trash mobs in ffxiv are uninteresting. It's just do your rotation, dodge lights.

Mazes and unique pathways don't work in this game because there is no open world adventure at all, so open world in this game is a illusion, when you're really just traveling A to B with no danger cuz mobs always stop chasing you. You obviously didn't play 11 because there were areas where the structure of the map could change. Routes that worked before won't this time.

Things to discover?
It's called randomization. If you don't know what is popping up when, or events. You can create infinite exploring. Problem is ffxiv has static fates that are always the same and in the same place and it's not thought provoking at all. Nodes are always exact same place. Just everything in ffxiv is predictable.

All of what OP said is possible.