The Graphics update was unnecessary

[Malthir]

That's extremely subjective. For example, in the case of FFXIV I'd put Story at the top, because if the story wasn't good I'd have zero reason to bother with this game in the first place.

It's not subjective, my statement was for MMO's as a whole and not ff14. The reason being is, you already know the FF14 story was good. However a new player doesn't, they've heard things but their experience is coming in blind which is why you can look at the generic MMO's features list.
The first thing a consumer is going to notice is the art style and theme, what I mean by this is some people cannot stomach anime style games so they would be uninterested in the art of some games, those that like that style or don't mind it will give it ago, from there the first thing they will notice is picking classes and the core gameplay loop.
The next thing they will encounter is UI, movement and combat if these are bad they will stop playing.

So what I'm talking about is not about personal preference, some people put more weight on one thing or another, however FF14 has serious issues in the core gameplay, movement, combat and UI all of which could have been done instead of the graphical update. Generally speaking graphics is the least important thing to most players, hence Runescape's popularity.

I wont talk about the discussion of job roles on the Dev team because honestly we don't know their setup. I'll go out on a limb both of us have either tech or games experience so we're disagreeing based on what we've seen in industry, and I think we can agree that few people end up wearing many hats. Ultimately the budget of an expansion is the budget, they chose to spend that budget on dev hours for a graphic update instead of using the budget for technical enhancements that would improve gameplay. I personally believe this is a mistake which is why I said in the beginning, I actually like the changes. However I don't think they offer value to the game as a whole. Generally, we all play pretty zoomed out, which makes a large portion of the changes unnoticeable. There are many more issues with the game that put potential players off and generally most of them are about movement and responsiveness, also the early player experience being bad.