Frankly I don't even think we're having the same conversation here. The point was never that I wanted them to be the same "size," I want them to be coherent places. And yes, 1.0 players were complaining about it, because 1.0 ran like warm butt and the entire game was about slowly running around to get to places and using your limited Anima for the occasional teleport. It was incredibly inconvenient. This would change the convenience factor by pretty much zero (hello, aethernet?) but would dramatically improve how it feels to be in a starting city. Just watch new players trying to get around a starting city sometime. The layouts are confusing to new players with or without zones, but the zones just add this extra pointless layer of frustration that makes it harder to parse where you are and what leads to what, since of course there are multiple entry points to the other zone. I would argue it's poor design and was clearly there so that the PS3 wouldn't explode the second you got to a city, considering the system was so overstressed that they couldn't add TP gauges to the party bars because the system was maxed out.

At this point in time, the starting cities are just strange vestigial design choices from a long gone era that put a damper on the starting player experience, but also don't do much for veteran players either. You want to walk upstairs in Limsa? Enjoy this loading screen! Going to the Inn? Another! Leaving the Inn? Enjoy a third! Going back down? Have a fourth! This would at least lose half those loading screens if someone were walking, and would be literally no different if someone were using the aethernet.