My problem with solution 9 - spoiler

[Taliriah]

I think that between allagan tech being embraced more and more (in particular by garlond ironworks whose latest gizmos literally look like allagan nodes), lopporits, garlemald starting to trade their hi-tech gizmos for food, building a FTL capable spaceship, and almost casually succeeding in implementing the large scale, cross shard engineering project of siphoning light aspected aether from the first to the thirteen, it makes sense story wise for FFXIV to embrace science fiction. "yeah we can build spaceships but let's continue to shun running water and electricity for some reason" would make less sense at this point.

It's also a good way to differentiate the next story arc from the one that just finished with EW.