Am I the only one who thinks a 6 month beta is too much?
Not even because I want to play ARR soon or anything, it would actually be beneficial to me to not have a MMO I'm really interested in released until next summer (out of RL reasons), but because I expect a game to be already mostly finished when it goes into beta state. If it takes more than half a year of fixes AFTER it went into beta it probably wasn't ready for beta anyways.
Beta should be used for general adjustments, most game breaking issues should be resolved beforehand..

Also, there's a certain time limit on how long you can keep people interested.
If you start hyping your game in spring 2012 and it's still not released in summer 2013 people will just lose interest in it.
Not true for ANY game, some games had people waiting for it for 20 years, but FFXIV ARR is not that kind of highly anticipated title.

Therefore I'm hoping for something between March and May 2013.