Why is this not the solution?

[Jojoya]

The original intent wasn't to have 30 players in a neighborhood, but 30 FCs. They should have never made wards open to players, and instead made instanced housing for them.

They did make instanced housing - apartments - even if it came an expansion later. But players don't want to own a room. They want to own a house.

SE could have kept the wards FC only but they would have remained empty wards. What they didn't think about is that FCs aren't rich. They have no way to make gil without a house. It's the individual players that are rich, and they aren't going to donate millions of their personal gil to a FC when they're not going to have control over what's done with that gil.

SE designed things backwards. They should have given FCs ways to earn gil then added houses as a way for FCs to spend what they earned. Instead, they designed it so FCs could only earn gil once they had purchased a house. Of course there were few FCs buying. That's led to the shell FCs being used by players to get rich through the gardens and workshops while blocking access to house ownership for other FCs and players who simply want to have a house, not a gil-making machine.

SE isn't accomplishing anything by sticking to a system that isn't serving the player base needs the way it should. They should have stopped all the way back in ARR and gone "This isn't working as we intended. What should we be doing to meet player needs?" and moved to a different system instead of continuing to pour money into this system for another 6 years.