Four points, complaints about which keep bubbling up at a faster and faster rate in these forums, and which could very well cause FFXIV's scant population to almost completely dry up, even before the arrival of version 2.0. Four points that could also cause the eagerly anticipated new population, expected to come with said version 2.0, never to materialize at the expected levels, if word gets out:
1) Perfunctory feel of combat / Pervasive weakness of foes / Quick-to-die enemies that don't allow classes to feel useful, let alone shine / Skills made uninteresting and unimportant by pace of fight / Action-spamming fights / Solo-style fighting, even in party... no sense of a team.
2) Overall lack of challenge / Easy world, easy quests, easy everything / Common drops that everybody ends up owning soon / Shallowness of Materia creation and melding.
3) Speed of leveling / Cap-heavy game / Shallow content and irrelevancy of goals for low and mid level.
4) Carelessly built chain of supply-and-demand that leads to a broken enconomy.
These are fundamentals that the game should be built on. Please give us a sign that you are aware of these issues, and that you intend to fix them; or at least, let us know otherwise, so that we don't waste our time pining for changes that shall never come.
The overall feeling in Eorzea these days (and this in Selbina, arguably the most populous server of them all) is one of inertia. Very little happens. Most players, are capped in multiple classes and seem to have had enough of the dungeons, the primals, the strongholds, the NMs... Veteran players are out "until the patch" with no promising objectives left to entice them into fight. People are either beta-testing Tera, or taking a break to try out The Old Republic, or perhaps finishing Skyrim. Anything but playing FFXIV. Some nights in the past two weeks it has felt like the world has ground to a halt. Please say something... More importantly, do something. Perhaps (since you don't seem to know it) start by asking someone to tell you how classic FFXI worked and understand where we are coming from.