Things are getting worse.

[Xatsh]

With housing it has always been bad. I think this comes from the fact originally it was designed for ONLY free companies to be able to purchase them. They were a perk for being in a guild, at the start it was a major thing for guilds to get. When they expanded this to individuals to be able to buy houses combined with increased player base a non-instanced housing system simply is not doable unless they literally add around 10xs the wards they have currently.

PvP. This is not a pvp game and it has always been an after thought. Yea it has always been bad but it was never a focus of FFXIV in any way. Sucked on day 1, still extremely subpar now. It is just a side activity in FFXIV like Chocobo Racing is more or less..

Class design I agree is worse. Especially healers. But this is core game design and philosophy. You CANNOT have near perfect balance, forced lowman content (aka 8 man instanced raids), and 100% 1 shot based scripted fights and have job uniqueness. All healers must be equal, all tanks must be equal, all melee must be equal, all mages must be equal, all physical range must be equal. Or you risk running into issue where certain groups cannot clear content with any form of effectiveness if they have the wrong setup. I honestly believe there is no in-between here you have balanced and homogeneous jobs or uniqueness and specialization.

Cosmetics: Yea I feel armor pieces and design has started to slack. We have a lot more recolored, minor modified pieces now then we use to. This is the one thing I agree with. Everything is a robe of some kind... usually very close to an existing piece atm.

But to be honest the game is not that much worse and the good things more then cover the things that got slightly worse over time. Being here from Alpha Testing I can say the game has not changed that much from ARR to now. Things keep getting dumbed down slightly and the focus is shifting more away from what is considered a generally considered a "MMORPG" game towards more a solo/co-op style hub game.... but I blame the community mainly for this. It is what the majority enjoy and it brings in the most players. So is it bad? depends on your mindset. Can't blame a company chasing the biggest profits and trying to make the majority happy.