Getting into Housing

[Atelier-Bagur]

housing serves a very important function in the overall game health in that it helps populate datacenters that would otherwise be left barren as people crowded and flocked to the more popular ones
take for example the current oceania DC situation, the place is barren because housing has not been enabled yet, very reminiscent of wow/gw2/new world servers a few weeks into the release of a new expansion.
FFXIV solves this by making houses, an extremely high demand item, available on a server basis, causing every datacenter to be naturally populated as people seek houses to buy

Similarly speaking there are a lot of mechanics in the game that look dumb but serve a purpose, such as shadowbringers relics being grindable in heavensward zones and stormblood alliance raids, which were done so to create the illusion that those areas were populated, so as to trick free trial players into subscribing.

I wouldnt necessarily word it like that with the ShB relic weapon grinds. It was more so to keep old zones/content still relevant for current game instead of falling into the typical WoW trap of nothing mattering after the previous expansion. Also to help new players not get into dead queues for when they're trying to run those raids first time as well.