We already have retainer subscription which is pay-to-gil basically. My friend can just be afk on PC with proper tools and amass gil just because he has more than 6+ retainers. It's basically free gil that you pay with real money.

Their introduction of battle pass would most likely be a mix of "free" with bad rewards and a paid one where you can earn a golden chocobo or something. Same thing as when they did a mount reward for twitch/tv but it was only for subscribers. So no. We pay for sub, people wanted shop for no reason, they got shop and now we have bare minimum content inside our game because most of good stuff is from shop. But community will always find a way to ruin this and seek for more.

Let's not even talk about mounts or hairstyles. Everytime people want it, it's never being asked to be introduced in a game, nah "put it in shop plz".