I agree that a slow and steady growth might be better, see XI.

You have the overwhelming majority of gamers who know about XIV with this mentality:

XIV is the worst mmo ever made, it is a 4/10. And there is no such things as a miracle path, and an expansion will not fix the broken game I played at launch.

That is what SE must change. A huge hype train will lead to disaster, but people who do not care about the game because they were burned at launch need to be forced to see that it is new. The amount of people who do not even know this game exist is shocking for a AAA title. SE should do more advertising after launch that is true. But they need to do enough advertising where any mmo player in the world when asked have you heard of FFXIV:ARR they say "Yea that is the game they rebuilt from scratch to make it modern" or "I heard they fixed alot of stuff how is it now" not "That game is the worst thing ever made" or "Square Enix has a mmo?"

Want to know why WoW is big. Go to any group of ppl and ask name a mmo. Almost all of them even non-gamers say WoW, I bet you will be lucky to hear 1/100 say XI or XIV. That is a huge problem.

All in all you cannot sell a new product if no one knows it exist, or if no one knows anything about it.