Square does need to take things from WoW and other mmos. But they need to leave the simplistic, shallow, solo focused gameplay out of ffxiv, there are like 12 mmos like that already with 3 more big mmos being launched soon which follow the solo player concept.

Most the people opposed to the ideas from WoW are because people do not want a Solo based western style game, they do not want dumbed down gameplay ffxiv is already overboard on this as it is, they do not want everything to ultra simplistic and easy to do. They want a feeling of accomplishment, a challenge, and something to work towards over a period of time... and WoW's game design offers none of this.

Some things from WoW would be great. Such as the party finder (although i am against it warping you to an instance... that is stupid and does nothing for the community) but where it would help is it will auto put you into a group for leves/missions/quest/normal partys would solve half the party issues. The dungeon system concept where there is a taste of endgame throughout the whole game is a great concept, just need to keep it level capped in ffxiv and make them harder. PvP battle fields and arena I think would be the best way to implement PvP in ffxiv. WoW's UI for the keyboard/mouse users is the best in the business they need to just copy paste how that works. And I would say most Fanboys of FFXI would probably not disagree in most these areas, but outside those changes I would rather not see anything else added from WoW.