Procedural terrain generation is good for breaking up monotony, but there definitely still needs to be some uniquely-tailored areas to make the world actually feel alive (one of the problems I had with vanilla Oblivion...). This is something people should learn from WoW (to name one example :P)... even though terrain maps are pretty much painted, there are tons of other little areas of interest that are thrown in (which is what truly makes the world seem like it is actually a world of its own rather than a series of variations randomly generated ).

FFXIV really doesn't seem to have that (or at least nearly enough of it) IMO.