And I'm not talking about the lack of cutscenes.
Or how poorly delivered the dialogs are. (two page long monologs, come on.)
I'm talking about originality.

I loved that pugilist quest in which you go around collecting money for the guild.
The one in which you had to get gil off the floor was awesome.

But the normal sidequests? Come on. They are all basically get X item, kill X quantity of monsters, etc.

I was playing Deus Ex today (By eidos, which is owned by SE as far as I know) and I had this sidequest, right? The game runs on unreal engine, yet its so original it tells you to go kill infiltrate this building, find this mobster, knock him out with your fists, then throw the body off the building to fake a suicide.

They took the game's basic elements and spinned them into something *really* original.
So yeah, I'd like to see the game designers' imagination shine in FFXIV's quests. 'Cause so far they are WoW-bad. FFXI had really moving, really original quests. They made you explore a lot, and travel through dungeons with puzzles and gates that required a certain amount of people to unlock doors or certain keys or to open certain gates...

And I'm not even asking that. I'm not saying rip off XI (although you totally should). I understand that so far there aren't many zones to work with. But I don't think its even about that. Its about spinning things so its not so obvious its a bare bones gather/kill quest.