On the offhand chance this might turn into an apartment features Megathread...

If the system needs to be redesigned from the ground up, then the features I'd like to see are:

Move the apartments into the capitals - There's no real need for them to be out in the wards as far as I can tell, and if you're looking for a neighborhood feel, you won't get much better than inside the city itself. Even places like Kugane still have activity even if it's much reduced from when Stormblood came out. Between the players and the npcs moving around, you don't get any sense of lonely or ghost town there.

Make the apartments upgradable to something equivalent in size to about the size of a Medium or slightly larger - I think most can agree that a medium is a pretty decent size for an individual player or maybe a married couple. Sure, some folks like the vast space of the larges, but if we're going for an average, a Medium probably works, and it would be a vast improvement over the size of apartments currently.

Give apartments different room layouts (for a price) - No different from having multiple floor plans for regular apartments... give us some floorplan options for our apartments. Maybe one has an indoor pond and garden area. Maybe one is one massive space with an upstairs loft/balcony and an open center. Maybe one has two stories or three. Maybe some are full-blown apartment plans with bedrooms and a kitchen area and such. It would be a way to give apartments an internal 'skin' as a contrast to the external ones for regular houses.

Give us not just balconies, but upgradable ones (again, for a price) - I know this one has been asked for forever, and as I recall, the problem with balconies is other players. In a city apartment, however, it would be easily fixed by simply giving us a view of the city and its npcs moving around with no players in sight. That gives you the bustle without the headache of making parts of it non-instanced. Alternatively, our balconies could face an interior square or other view where you might see one or two npcs moving around but otherwise we get a lovely view of gardens or a beach or portion of the city or something else. The apartments themselves could even be relatively high up so you wouldn't necessarily see people much, but still get a great view of the city.

And make them upgradable. For a price, you can make your balcony larger so you can put out garden items and maybe set out a plot to do some gardening with. You could also go the route of it's a penthouse suite and you have access to turn the rooftop into a garden/yard area. There could even be space for a built-in pool or something. There's options for a lot of things.

Make the apartment item limit 400 - Okay, I get that increasing item limits in general is a problem. Player computers can cry painful, bitter, tears of sorrow if they're not on the top side of systems. And part of it is exacerbated by having a lot of items crammed into a single small space. That said, people can cram 400 items into a single apartment sized space in a large and people can still come and visit without too much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. I'm pretty sure we can afford to just blanket give everyone a 400 item limit without it making people's systems cry too hard. And for something approximately the size of a Medium house... 400 should be enough for most designs.

Overall, there are a ton of options, and people have been trying to suggest them for literally years, and with the current mutiny regarding houses, it's something that is overdue to be addressed properly. There are enough people that want this that we're happy for y'all to devote your time and effort on sorting things out so something like what I've mentioned could work. Or, you know, you could make the Island Sanctuaries housing opportunities as well. I imagine most won't object to that either.