FFXI’s Bard was way cooler than XIV’s, just saying.

I honestly don’t understand how you could come to the conclusion that they’re trying to make this game like XI in any form.

Literally every FF game has countless references and nods to other titles in the series, which is as far as the devs will go. XIV and XI are polar opposites in terms of battle system, content design, job design, etc.

XIV’s content will always always be much lower on the difficulty scale, less complex, more user friendly and heavily reliant on daily/weekly lockouts to keep subs. This will never change.