Having follow through animations does not cause animation lock... animation lock causes animation lock.

Animations have 0 control over your actual ability to do anything in a game, developers create limitations in order to preserve the fidelity of the animations "it wouldn't look good if someone moved during this animation, so let's lock actions and movement until it completes."

You can remove that rule and still leave things in place like follow through as a character slows down to a stop, you just allow them to suddenly change direction during this follow through, with blending it sure as hell wouldn't look any worse than completely removing all follow through, which gives characters a robotic feeling when they move.

I'm perfectly fine with animation lock being done away with, especially in places where it made battles needlessly difficult, but one thing the game's movement has always done is give my character a sense of being physically grounded, something that a lot of MMOs lack, because the animations are floaty and rigid.

I'm not going to quit FFXIV over this, but considering the animations already exist, I do hope they decide to re-implement them, sans animation lock.