Naoki Yoshida admits the state of the game troubled him even before its release

Couldn't find this anywhere else, apologies if it's already been posted, just report the OP to be locked.

He doesn't really say anything that we hadn't already gathered from following FF XIV, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

One thing I didn't agree with are his comments about World of Warcraft. In fact, I completely disagreed with those. If there's one thing the gaming world doesn't need any more of right now, it's WoW clones.

That was the part of his statement I really agreed with. How can you make an MMO while ignoring the most commercially successful MMO of all time? You have to start from WoW and improve its flaws of accessibility, of grinding, of social engagement and so on. WoW, but better, is exactly what people bored of WoW right now would be looking for.

The mistake other devs make is they make WoW+gimmick, where the gimmick is some epic hyped design bulletpoint that is fun for the first week of play and then gets old and people go back to WoW. Long-term fixes of WoW's flaws are the way to avoid that.

It's ironic that the same thing that saved the company once is also the same thing that almost destroyed it later... twice!

That's exactly the point.  The improvements you're describing is what WoW has become in the past few years.  It's become hugely more accessible (to the point where it turned a lot of long-time players away like me), they've nerfed the levels of grinding for pretty much everything to the ground, the social features are vastly improved.  If people want to play that game, they'll play Warcraft.  For the same reason that Call of Duty sells better than every single CoD clone out there every year.

And all the WoW clones already in existance, while not dead, aren't exactly doing stellar either.  The Old Republic; Rift; Tera; Runes of Magic; Talisman Online.  There are enough.  The market doesn't need another one.

What something needs to do is completely shake the MMO market up.  I'm not saying make a pile of broken crap missing basic features like FF XIV was, but equally, it doesn't need to be based on everything that WoW has become.  I understand the point you're making in that building on the basis of things warcraft did right might be a good choice, but there are plenty of games who have done that already and what really needs  to happen is something brand new.

Look at Eve Online, that's doing surprisingly well.  It's probably not accessible enough to be mainstream, but at least it's doing something different.