How much is the game held back by technical constraints?

[Bubline]

We always hear about spaghetti code but how much of it is true? I'm a game programmer and my impression of FFXIV based on how it feels to play, is that they have been mostly unable to truly add new mechanics to the game or to polish the gameplay and UX. Most of the content that gets made reuses the exact same systems that have existed since ARR. There are improvements to those systems, but very few actual new systems that enable meaningfully new or different gameplay.

Let me give some examples:

• UI/UX: The UI is incredibly clunky. It seems that most actions lock you in certain modes that are rigid and not compatible with each other, so you can only browse one UI at a time and can't easily access a lot of things. This applies to things like glamour dressers being a usability mess due to vague "server constraints"
• Retainers: Same applies to the retainer system, which is needlessly obtuse and an obstacle to selling your items. It feels like 1.0 legacy.
• Inventory: Speaking of items, let's talk about how bad inventory management is. Everything gives all sorts of tokens that have to take inventory space and for some reason can't be stored as currencies. I had an entire retainer of just raid tokens of all sorts. That combined with the convoluted armory chest system means everyone has to inevitably spend an hour doing inventory management every now and then
• Market: Pricing and selling items on the market requires so many steps to see prices, probably because of server constraints that often get mentioned
• World Content: The world content hasn't innovated since FATEs. Everything is just FATEs. Even field exploration zones are just a map with fates.
• New systems are just old systems in disguise: Cosmic exploration is fun conceptually, but in truth it's also nothing meaningfully new. It's just fates where you sit and craft in a loop. Deep dungeons have better bosses now but they're just the same series of corridors behind the scenes. Field explorations already mentioned. Island sanctuary mostly failed due to it relying on interacting with clunky UIs. I can't think of anything else that's "new"
• Endgame progression unchanged: The routine of tomestones, raid tokens etc has been unchanged for probably a decade now. I assume this is more a design issue than a technical issue, as the team is maybe scared of bothering players with change. The thing is, the current system, as was designed back then, is incredibly convoluted for new players. The way players have to obtain various tokens to go to various merchants to get gear is incredibly obtuse and really not communicated well to players. It makes the system feel very old and boring.
• Tutorialisation and discovery of content: There has been 0 innovation in this category. The vast majority of features of this game are obtuse to get into and not explained well to players. Everything is gated behind "+" quests that give no indication of what they unlock. Someone who doesn't have friends explaining them things can very easily miss entire chunks of the game without realising they exist.
• Information QOL: Finding what any item does is a chore. Item tooltips are not very useful. A ton of information is locked behind hard to navigate UIs, and some of the information is just not there. This extends to so many details that it's hard to point at a specific thing but just the entire experience of interacting this game feels like a lot of it was made in pre-wow times, despite this game being much more recent than wow. Even navigating the map is a weirdly clunky mess.