I don't care how many FFXI and XIV devotees like to claim their titles of choice are "just as good." It's a different product for a different audience. It's not the same thing. They're entirely different in structure and experience from a game designed to be a single player, cinematic, linear experience rather than a treadmill/skinner box to suck time and thus money from each player as long as possible. The business needs the title represents necessarily inform the structure and pacing of the game.
I played FFXIV v2 to the end credits (though I have not yet played Heavensward) and it was probably the best MMORPG I've played, but it is absolutely shackled by its specific genre and the purpose of its creation. You have to do shitty sidequests to get to the shitty sidequests. I'll never forget being made to collect food for a feast so we can talk to some jerk while a Primal attack could happen at any time.
It's 90% anticlimactic filler. Not at all like the lightning fast pacing of the offline games in the first 2/3 of the series. The only exciting and cinematic moments are the pre-rendered intros to each expansion, which are admittedly pretty amazing. Everything else is either mute talking heads bobbing in an idle stance and shifting roboticly into emotes while the text drones on and on about nothing (content!) or else excruciatingly voiced scenes where everybody puts on their best dinner theater English accents and those scenes still have static blocking and camera work and poor writing and pacing. There's nothing there that even out does the presentation of FFX.
FFXIV can be pretty at times, the music is good, and some people truly enjoy the grind, but it's a fundamentally different beast. Playing a remix of the FF3 battle theme occasionally and letting you wear a white mage's robe doesn't mean they've nailed the feel of the older games. I get exactly what the person you were responding to is talking about. The MMOs can never be a replacement for the offline titles.
FF needs to work on its presentation in a lot of facets. Getting in people who are less baroque in their visual design is absolutely part of it. But learning or re-learning what pacing is, in cinematic design, scenario, and game play seems to me to be at least as important as well.