Unfortunately, instances housing is highly unlikely. People have been screaming for that from the start and they insist that their servers can't handle that sort of stress. As it is, it's taken us years for them to even admit they're poking at the idea of apartment upgrades, and it's been cricket chirps on that since then so we don't know if that's even a possibility either.

The more housing at least is coming slowly. Since they make the changes for all the servers evenly, they keep pointing at the less populated servers with hundreds of open houses on them instead of adding new wards (which apparently also increase server strain) until enough people howl and scream about not wanting to leave their home server that they don't have much of a choice.

Your other suggestions are good though. I can't even imagine why it would be a problem to allow folks to share apartments. That's not even as complicated as an alt sharing a house. And while I respect their desire to keep flippers from grabbing houses to sell for 4 and 5x their market worth, the random timer has become a real source of frustration and complaint for a fairly large slice of the playerbase. As is evidenced by the fact that practically the only threads on the housing forum that are active are complaint threads about it. A different solution would be nice. Sadly I won't hold my breath for it.

As much as I love this game and my house (which I was extremely fortunate to get before all this madness was implemented), the whole thing is a tangled mess. One I don't see them fixing until they upgrade their server numbers or quality and wholescale plop FF14 onto the same engine 15 had at the very least. But I won't hold my breath for that either. They've made it extremely clear that allocating resources to a project like that is about as likely as a snowball fight with Ifrit. We shouldn't expect such things from them anyway since they're apparently a 'small indie company' and can't afford such things. <.<