I would heavily disagree with your statement regarding today's difficulty with making money. The amount of cash people carry around nowadays is nothing like what it used to be during ARR.
Can't speak for Ragnarok, but even very casual FCs could afford a small house on Gilgamesh. Hell, I recall me and a few friends ended up buying a Mist 1 in a matter of 2-3 weeks just ahead of patch 2.3. As I've written, some people might have appreciated the reduction, but it's far from rewarding when SE is diminishing the efforts of hundreds of FCs by slashing the prices.
My suggestion wouldn't lower the amount of buyers. What it aims at is progressively prevent the 40 players on certain servers from being able to purchase a house the moment it becomes available. I can see why you would use fiat, but it doesn't line up with what I am presenting. Are fiat currencies more "stable" than gil? I guess it depends on what your currency is, but it doesn't matter. If you know the right people, you can buy a million for a dollar. If you don't, you're gonna be looking a spending anything between 2 and 6. There used to be a time where a million could only be purchased above 15$ after midnight on Balmung. Long gone are these days, but using fiat as a way to gauge inflation in FFXIV just doesn't really work.
It is fallacious to think "rich players" are interested in owning multiple houses. The very few individuals or FCs that are interested in managing multiple plots are a non-factor in the current environment because of the sheer amount of plots compared to the ARR era. Besides, the very reason behind housing is to take gil away from rich players while less fortunate players can just wait a bit. After all, the devaluation timer is still present, it's just inefficient on North American servers.
I did and I think the same way to a certain extent. If whatever I'm doing ingame doesn't reward me with X amount of gil per hour, then I'm looking for something that is more efficient. As written in that paper, make things too easy (as they are now) and RMT thrives. Make things too difficult (2.1 price chart) and RMT thrives.
What problem would arise? What other ideas are as simple as altering the sticker prices?
Every time someone suggests something, they never talk about the investment SE would have to make. In this case, they have already stated that a full blown instanced housing system (actual houses, since apartment are a form of housing) is not something they want to pursue.
Again, that would require a full blown instanced housing system and that's just not happening considering the producer has said he's not interested and how they have doubled down on the ward based system since 2013...
Heavily increased? Are you mad?
The goal isn't to help poor players since they can already purchase apartments and FC rooms at a fraction of what a house cost. I don't know how you came up with that conclusion since what was brought forward is exclusively to prevent 40 people from trying to purchase a plot the moment it goes up for sale. You know, as it was originally intended...
My FC doesn't really care about expanding beyond what we have and the amount of FCs or players like myself barely represent 1% of the available plots across all servers. You can complain about the 1% all you want, but you should take a few step away from the tree you're starring at and look at the thousands of plots that are empty or the thousands of players who rely on emails to be reminded that their house is about to be demolished because clearly they really use it.
We are not the norm. If it were for me, I'd go straight back to that 2.1 price chart, but I can see how unpopular that would be due to how entitled players are nowadays. Personal housing is the bulk of the problem with housing and there are already restrictions in place to prevent multiple personal house ownership. You can take away the FC houses owned by the "same" FCs tomorrow and you'll be back to square one by the end of the week.