The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Taliriah]

I just wonder how much of the dev time was wasted on something that doesn't really improve the game when all that time developing a new lighting engine could have been spent on better mechanics for play or more importantly imo fixing the garbage movement in the game so you character actually collides with terrain instead of sliding along the ground plane, that's probably the biggest barrier to entry for alot of new players.

Game developers are specialized. The graphics programmers who worked on improving the lighting would not have otherwise worked on gameplay features, because that's the job of gameplay programmers.

The graphics update was needed. Not only because quite a few aspects of the game were starting to look dated, but also because those flaws (such as the lack of subsurface scattering) made characters a lot uglier than necessary, and in FFXIV people are really connected with their character. The changes to characters are objectively minor. Of course when you are used to things being one way, flaws and all, upgrades bring a feeling of unfamiliarity that can be unsettling, but it will pass a lot quicker than people think, and character that look better are simply better in the long term, regardless of whatever temporary subjective misgivings people may have.

The people who complain should ask themselves this: if they didn't play the game before the graphics update, how would they feel about the characters appearance?

Another reason the graphics update was necessary is because at some point it can become really bad for your technology to stay behind the times. It means that new people you hire may not know how to work with it (unfamiliarity with old, deprecated methods), it means people are starting to get worried that their skills are not up to date with the industry, etc. I think Yoshi-P explained this.