More enterable buildings, please!

[KisaiTenshi]

This is pretty clear – it's because they haven't built the whole manor, just the one room that you load into, and because they don't expect you to trudge up and down Syrcus Tower every time the Exarch calls a meeting. (That and they probably don't want to have to resolve exactly where in the tower the Ocular is located, but anyway.)

And yet for the Reaper job and Rogue class, there is also "just a guy out front". Just saying, this is ridiculous. Either the door opens and we have an entire major (a la Sharlayan Leveilleur manor) or we enter into a "loading tunnel" room like with the Waking Sands that just silently passes us off to an instance.

The Crystal tower is the weird exception because technically it is unchanged from Syrcus Tower with "The Twinning". Surely someone would have made an aetheryte to the ocular by now right?

I disagree. I think it's unrealistic to expect to be let into every single locked door, and having them there makes the city implied to be much bigger than the devs can afford to model it.

Towns (and the setting in general) already have a problem with looking extremely low-populated with only a few buildings each. Removing doors that don't go places would be detrimental.

They will look low populated regardless if you can open the doors or not, not being able top open most of the doors gives the impression that it's not a living city but just a series of unfinished buildings at best, or "a facade" at worse. Ul'dah and Gridania are particuarly bad about no-entry doors, but also places like Quarrymill and Onokoro where the deep dungeon's are. You would think there would be large shops and an inn at least next to them, but there isn't. Just some guys hanging out by the entrance to trade the loot with.

As they would need to be behind zone-ins (polygons and people with 9xx series video cards) is it really immersion breaking?

I mean it's a pity, but as soon as they stick them behind zone-ins, most people wouldn't ever bothering to enter.

That really needs to be something they need to fix. Many other games, older games, didn't have this problem. It only became a thing to have "every NPC glued to the floor outside the building" because it meant the developers didn't need to build the interior, but also they relied on the outside instance capacity rather than having either a seamless interior or an instanced interior. We know they can do this because of the Waking Sands and the player housing.

Actual "shops" make more sense when the NPC is inside, not outside standing in the rain. Many of these "empty" spaces could have NPC's in them that appear during certain times of the day, or maybe people sleeping on beds at night. CRPG's Games back in 1990 already had this figured out, and they had to fit on 1MB of memory. NPC's that you "can talk to" should be either wandering around on a schedule, being in different places during the day and at night. NPC's that operate businesses, there should be "Khloe" standing outside during the day, and "Zhloe" out during the night. Maybe it's too much to have businesses look like businesses, sure it's not core to the game but it's kinda silly seeing the 39th "junkmonger" NPC without a name.