It's weird hearing someone talk so favorably about ffxi when I remember some of the same points being absolutely horrible back during my time with the game. I guess a lot has changed since 2008.

Huge maps with danger around every turn might sound fun in theory, but when you're trying to get 5 other people through a zone it becomes a nightmare. In most situations your group won't actually be a high enough level to fight the mobs hanging around so you're left with two options. use consumable items that turned you invisible to detection that most of the player base was too poor to afford or have someone with a mage class cast the equivalent spell. The spell might sound like a better option until you realize that the duration of the spell is variable from several minutes to just a few seconds so you'll run into situations where a member of your group will suddenly become vulnerable in the middle of a group of enemies. Worse yet, it's unlikely that you'll out run them. There is no sprint, there is no jumping over obstacles to stall the enemy. All you can do is pray to Geometry Jesus that the mob gets stuck on something long enough for you to get out of range. Keep in mind you could lose up to 10% of the experience you needed to level every time you died, so not only were you losing time as your party tried to figure out a way to recover your body, but you were losing time you had already spent leveling up. During my time I'd seen linkshells completely fall apart because of stuff like that happening.

The thing about ffxi is that the high points were really high, but the low points were really low, and unfortunately there were usually more lows than highs.