ffxi gameplay was not slow

[Sephr]

you were provoking, shield bashing, meditating, keeping utsusemi up, covering, meditating, keeping up third eye, berserk, flash, absorb skills, enfeebles, curing yourself and allies, covering allies, timing your weaponskills for skillchains and magic bursts.

You're just listing a bunch of unrelated abilities used by various classes? Anyone could do that for FFXIV to make it sound like they're doing a lot, and at least they could all be equippable by one character.

Let's break them by warrior as an example then:
Provoke (tank only) once every 30 seconds
Berserk every 2 minutes
Utsusemi (tank only mostly, even in abyssea despite the lack of dedicated tanks most people wont be getting hit a lot)
WS

No one skillchains. No one magic bursts.

If you're implying that this is back when FFXI was young, there were even less abilities to be used by classes like warrior and dark knight, absorb skills were pointlessly weak and there was no point in using elemental spells. Black mages pretty much did nothing but cast an AM once per mob timed to a magic burst.

It wasn't faster, it just wasn't.

Edit: Also, it's not ignorance to compare the two and say FFXIV's is faster purely based on the fact that you HAVE to press something to even do anything. It's certainly not the better of the two systems right now but saying XI's was actually faster is just wrong.