What has happened to my beloved FFXIV?

[Ilyrian]

Square Enix seem to be having a bit of a meltdown at the moment. I doubt FFXIV is high on their list of priorities.

[Talonk]

Well, as someone who's been here since 2.1, I will throw in my two cents... [minor spoilers ahead if you aren't caught up on story]

ARR was a great starting point. The game changed a heck of a lot from start to finish and it laid a solid foundation. The dev team experimented a bit to find out what players wanted to do, learned from a lot of mistakes that haven't since been repeated, and started kicking the story into gear by the end of the expac.
HW built a bit on what ARR started and added some popular new things like PotD and normal mode 8-man raids, had a phenomenal story for MMO standards, and was all-around satisfying by focusing on content meant for everyone being able to enjoy. Gordias and the drought between 3.0-3.1 weren't repeated. Diadem... well. At least gatherers had a cool place to get rare mats.
SB has been HW with less of the same and a lot of niche content that didn't have wide appeal. Perform, Canals, Eureka, Ultimate, PvP... all content for a small subsection of people, and most of it met with indifference or outright hostility. While dungeons were never exciting content, losing some content everyone does to gain nothing in return for most players is pretty bad. I think the only content that was met with joy was Ultimate and they actually canned the last planned fight in that series to do... something? We don't know. And honestly I feel like the story is lacking. Liberating Ala Mhigo in 20 minutes was lame, Yotsuyu's entire arc felt contrived, and only now are things finally getting interesting with Alphinaud the Burn but we have to keep trudging around Eorzea/Othard to find out why the Scions are being put on a bus again...

Eureka gets multiple concurrent complaint threads because it was supposed to be tentpole content and SE stuck the relic weapon behind it. Unfortunately SE doesn't seem to realize that 1. Players are tired of FATEs as content, 2. Old-school mob grinds died for a damn good reason, 3. RNG on RNG on RNG is not fun, just frustrating. If 5.x is still more like this then I think the game might run into some problems.

The same could be said about the heavensward story. The warriors of darkness are was one whole patch. That was it short sweet and uninteresting only to reveal a job coming in the next expansion. Then after that we started following the ala mhigan resistance for the rest of the expansion while trudging around eorzea waiting for the scions to get on the bus. So I mean by all means the story is in the same format as was stopping Thordan, tho I'll give you this building up to nidhogg was really good. But other than that heavensward is no where near outstanding.

[Vahlnir]

Square Enix seem to be having a bit of a meltdown at the moment. I doubt FFXIV is high on their list of priorities.

Yeah, there's a good possibility that we will get even less, and of even lesser quality in the coming patches/expansion. They've got some work to do after losing about 30 million dollars. For them, or other big name companies it might not seem like much, but it's definitely not a number to scoff at either.