I mean, one only needs to remember that despite having a better designed overworld for their game, WoW did try to completely remove their flying feature once and to say it was a catastrophe would be an understatement. Plus it did nothing to solve the issues they believe it caused or did the overall health of the game improve as their claims said it would.
XIV's overworld isn't even close to being in the same position to where they can try to justify cutting flying and/or atherytes and they very likely aren't going to attempt it either.