Why do we keep coming back to this?

FFXI is a 10 year old game; the genre has evolved. The sooner we can all come to this conclusion, the better off we'll all be. You'll never see many of the conventions that we had in XI because it's not conducive to a good business strategy. SE wants this game to have mass-appeal; something that FFXI NEVER had. In its peak, XI had MAYBE 500,000 simultaneous active subscriptions. After all, it was such a niche game.

Developing another game, specifically for the small minority who still have a raging hard-on for XI is essentially suicide for SE's business. You may attract tons of former XI subscribers, but you'll never get a larger piece of the market if your game is too much more obscure from what else is on the market.

tl;dr- 2012 nostalgia goggles opted out of money-printing feature.