The MMO genre as a whole is just screwed. Rotted from the inside out by terrible developers, greedy corporate decisions, and stupid short sighted players who wouldn't boycott the bad shit when there was still a chance to turn it around.
For XIV in particular, it's truly dire, because it offers nothing particularly exceptional anymore. If you want a good story, you won't find it here; you're better off opening literally any book, or just blindly opening some slop on Netflix. If you want engaging gameplay, you're better off playing a single player game. If you want a community, you're better off helping your local crackhead with his dailies in real life, because at least he won't report you for being like "aw, shit" when things go wrong.
The parallels to when Blizzard was screwing up WoW are pretty interesting. In both cases, we have developers sort of resting on their laurels and thinking they can slack but keep their numbers up based on past success. If Yoshida gets caught with a bottle of breastmilk like that Blizzard exec a while back, we'll basically be proving that time is a loop.

But yeah. I like this game because I don't mind running the same slop over and over again, and I enjoy being a bizarre gremlin, but I don't "care about" this game anymore like I used to. When it goes down for maintenance, I'm not jonesing to log back in. When I'm at work, I'm not wanting to go home to play more XIV. And I'm like that about all MMOs now, where before I used to be quite addicted. But once you see how content sooooooooo many mmo studios are to just take advantage of player trust, it becomes difficult to invest into the genre. In my first MMO, maplestory, I played the crap out of it and spent a worrying amount of time in it. Probably addicted. But the company running it made a ton of greedy decisions and ruined the game over time. The next one was tera. Great gameplay loop. Fun hard mode content. I actually progged in that game, even helped build a guild where we taught newer folks that game's savage equivalent and got them into raiding. I hate raiding in this game and don't do it, so people tell me I'm a casual, but I used to do that shit all the time. I just don't in this game, because raiding in XIV is shit. Anyway, Tera fell apart for the same old reasons. Shitdevs and bad corporate decisions chipping away at a game we all loved. then came bdo, which -- LOL. If you know, you know. That game promised to be a fair experience since it was b2p, but then they had p2w shit on day 1. That was the real unveiling moment for me, idk. There are only so many times you can dive into something and be ripped off/cheated before you just stop caring. Then came XIV, which I enjoy casually, because I genuinely don't have the time or the patience or the inclination at this point to dive any deeper into something that, ultimately, doesn't even matter at the end of the day. Every expac I thank god that the savage glams don't appeal to me, because it means I won't feel compelled to dredge up old habits and actually build a small group to prog with in a game with a boring combat loop, scripted fights, and mechanics that penalize the shit out of you because one guy in your team is blind and dumb as hell.

But man I'm digressing hard. MMOs are screwed. Every studio realizes that it's easier to just half ass a mobile game and make way more money. Enjoy what you will, but there's no future here. Even WoW, on a long enough scale, will get comfy again and start sipping breastmilk like nothing happened.