But not as biased as you'd think.

http://kotaku.com/5963155/new-final-...h-the-original
The funny part is, this is how you know you couldn't have blamed Tanaka (like it seems to be the cool thing), because he had them do their homework for XI's development, so XIV clearly was a misstep by the entire company, not just one man.

In Yoshida's opinion, the reason FFXI was a success is that it took the areas where Final Fantasy was strongest—cutscenes, dramatic scenarios, and story-driven content—and input them into an EverQuest inspired framework.
Just a key note for those who like to tell people SE shouldn't look at what they did with XI and learn from it.

Something XIV was and is missing in comparison to it's predecessor.

However, when the original FFXIV was in development, the goal of the project was simply to make a game that was different from Final Fantasy XI. Yoshida feels that the creators didn't recognize that the global standard of MMOs had been significantly raised in recent years. He would have suggested a different path for the game—one that mirrored FFXI's own creation. "I think it would've been good if they tried seeing what happened if they turned World of Warcraft into Final Fantasy. So, because they tried only to make something that was 'different from FFXI,' they ended up with not much of anything."
I don't agree with this because we seen what happened when people settle for doing exactly the bolded, but I agree with what he was trying to say.