i think in 7.x they need to return and work on "forgotte" systems in place of new one

[Jeeqbit]

What's the point of the Fellowship Menu again?

To find likeminded people. It's frequently used by new players. Fellowships have been made to find people who speak the same language, want to form statics, do minimum item level content, join hunt linkshells or to advertise RP events. They usually advertise a discord server or CWLS and it's easy to invite members to a CWLS without having to be in a party or switch worlds. Some of them use the message board feature, such as static recruitment fellowships. I've seen a lot of Fellowships reach 1,000 members within a few months or less.

They could be better, but it's not true that they are unused. I've joined a lot of cross-world linkshells and discord servers through them.

[Midareyukki]

To find likeminded people. It's frequently used by new players. Fellowships have been made to find people who speak the same language, want to form statics, do minimum item level content, join hunt linkshells or to advertise RP events. They usually advertise a discord server or CWLS and it's easy to invite members to a CWLS without having to be in a party or switch worlds. Some of them use the message board feature, such as static recruitment fellowships. I've seen a lot of Fellowships reach 1,000 members within a few months or less.

They could be better, but it's not true that they are unused. I've joined a lot of cross-world linkshells and discord servers through them.

Congratulations on being the one person.

It's still a glorified pinboard with serious limitations, a feature we frankly never needed.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

They work off of Sprints, it's Agile Development. So they have more than ample time to assess costs. If they ever wanted to revisit these older systems, they frankly could allocate costs for a long-term thing. Alternatively, you sure going back to older systems and adding to them is costlier than making up a whole new one? Because half the code would already be there, no? Rather than doing one from scratch?

In actuality, not always. Technical debt in agile development environments is disastrous, and can result in systems being much easier to code in brand new then trying to rework, mess around or expand on already existing ones. Take inventory for example. From the small amount of technical information they've given, due to the fact the inventory is loaded with your character 100% of the time wherever you go, adding even one inventory slot to it is an extreme precision art that takes months to years of meticulous planning and stress testing. Whereas they can so easily implement Chocobo saddlebags because of the fact that they are entirely decoupled from the inventory code and are their own independent system that isn't perpetually loaded 100% of the time. Entirely new systems are much easier to code if the technical debt of a current existing system makes development of expansion on said system drawn out & harder. Housing is another good example, where the technical debt on the ward system in the short term still has far flung reaches into the future in regards to its scalability.

Beyond that, let's be realistic. There's a reason the entire mobile market uses the 'hey look at this shiny new thing' gameplay design; it works.

The simple reality is, the average customer is going to generate infinitely more interest in shiny, new content, rather than updates to pre-existing content they might have already ran into the ground, or had zero interest in. take the Gold Saucer, where Chocobo Racing & lords of verminion, even in their primes, were niche categories. Expanding those old games would be a colossal waste of time for the devs when it comes to profits, when they could develop a brand new GATE that will likely see intensely far more use and be far more popular...along with being able to hype the playerbase by showing off brand new screenshots of it.

It's the same reason WoW (and to a lesser extent, other MMOs) introduce grand new systems during expacs which are then forgotten/replaced/ignored in the future. "HEY GUYS, LOOK AT THIS NEW SYSTEM, WHERE YOU WILL HAVE A WEAPON THAT GROWS IN POWER WITH YOU THROUGH THE EXPAC" sounds infinitely more marketable and cooler to the crowd that loves the shiny new content trick than 'Oh yeah, we made some updates to this 5 year old content, enjoy.'

It's a sad reality, but most systems in FF14 are too niche, too old, or been outright replaced for them to be profitable to touch again. The old stuff that does get touched (Duty support for old dungeons, ARR quest trimming, old zone reduxes, etc) are mostly because they are in-line with a greater goal that will enhance profitability of the game (enhance the solo experience to draw in players not as interested in the MMO side)

based on my own time in game dev, this is extremely likely the thought process behind the dev's views on certain old systems:

Squadrons: who cares? trusts are going to be taking over every MSQ dungeon soon.
Veteran Rewards: we already trimmed these because we saw how impossible the later rewards were for people joining the game to get in a reasonable amount of time, we ain't falling into that trap again.
Achievement certificates: anything we add here provides literally 0.1s of playtime for well over half our playerbase who has been playing long enough to get enough achievement certificates to buy anything we could possibly release, so they're a waste to add anything but throw away orchestrion scrolls when we could add the rewards anywhere else and create more playtime in the form of grinds.
verminion/Chocob racing: these were already niche content to begin with, why bother when we could expand the list of content in the GS instead using that same dev time and market all the shiny new things?

It really would be a few years.

Exactly why it will never happen.

Taking a few years to re-do the entire codebase for the game, which would require massive rewrites to countless systems that were added across the game since 2.0, would be such a costly business decision that would be impossible to be approved of by the board of directors. Why bother spending those years working on remaking 14 which is currently printing money on its own due to record high profits expansion over expansion, when you could spend that entire time making a new MMO instead? That's the logical fallacy of re-doing the codebase. if they ever arrive at such a situation, they're just going to go make FF17 instead and use the time more productively. 14's technical debt is here to stay.

[Jeeqbit]

It's still a glorified pinboard with serious limitations, a feature we frankly never needed.

We did need it. New players are not aware of all of these discord servers and have trouble forming social connections such as CWLS. Fellowships are a way to guide them into these and they do. They are not really meant for the veteran players who visit these forums as much as they are for new players.

[Kaliesto]

Finish up the ranking system of Squadrons or give it a re-work for current day FFXIV.

Return the removed PVP maps back into FFXIV that was taken away over the years.

The Chocobo Companion System, update to its combat abilities & remove the requirement of Thavnairian Onions since people been gil abusing others on the market board.

Decrease mechanic timers for all monsters across all current wilderness areas from ARR to EW including regular FATEs, as they are now they're way too easy. There is no point for these monsters to have mechanics if you can just simply dodge it so easily because of the long winding time for each creature to use it. The only time you'll ever be hit if you're literally role-playing turn-based combat by allowing yourself to stay within the cone, AOE or etc. I don't recall other MMOs having such a inbalance issue.

Increase Tribe Points from ARR to Shadowbringers, due to the amount of tribes now I think players would want to catch up as much as they can to do current content.

Other things (not really related I just want to throw in here):

I uh...I still want the ghost hotel from FF7 be put into the Gold Saucer, I want a creepy hangout spot. >.>