Quote Originally Posted by Enkidoh View Post
1.0 was really, really bad. So bad SE fired or demoted the members of the original development team that developed it and brought in Yoshi to lead a new team to fix the mess. And after a lot of examination and discussion, came to the conclusion it was beyond saving and only by tearing it down and starting again from scratch would work. ARR was the result.

Now, there were some good things about it, and a handful of things I liked, but those few good points were drowned under by the huge stinking piles of everything the game did wrong.
Except they didn't really tear anything down to start again, they built on top of what was already there. Which is why we are faced with so many insurmountable problems today, like the pitiful character creation options from 2005 and the weird class/job stone system.