Please show us something!

[Lauront]

I don't know anymore. In my country, everything has opened and people stopped caring about keeping a safe distance :/. People are forgetting about this and it's sad. Japan on the other hand can't pretend things are alright because it really isn't.

What's happening in Japan? Seems to be fine to me. They've scaled back their state of emergency too, which was advisory except for the government. There's a lot of focus on infection numbers (by and large asymptomatic) and localised flare ups (sometimes reported as "second waves"), but in terms of deaths, progress is being made, and we're also seeing lots of progress on the medical front, in terms of effective treatments. I'm not too surprised the lockdowns have lost credibility, though.

Anyway, most of the developed world is now scaling back the lockdown measures and they're poised to deliver an update soon, so of course excitement for 5.3 is building up. It's much nearer in sight.

"A lot of tech companies" doesnt mean that SE and specifically the FFXIV-dev-team had such a system in place - from all that we know: They didnt, at least not straight away. If you read the letter from the producer from June 4, you'll see that Yoshida talks about how at that point most of their staff had finished setting up their workstations at home, implicating that not everyone had yet and that it took them quite a while (-> https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/420143)
It doesnt matter if other tech companies had remote desktop lined up the week the pandemic became a huge issue. You can obviously take a stance of "But SE should have been able to just switch everyone to home office!", the fact remains that they didnt and couldnt - at least not for the FFXIV team.

The matter of fact is also that they eventually made working from home possible - but it took them a while. Ultimatly thats the reason that 5.3 wont get more delayed, though.

WFH is basically not as entrenched in Japan because of the smaller housing units there - but at least now SE have the infrastructure set up for it.