I shall address these point-by-point. I assure you that I did not mean that the game is only about progress.

1. FFXIV becomes a glorified chatroom. I can speak with everyone I play Final Fantasy XIV with through other media on the internet.
2. What Final Fantasy XIV has to offer at this point is fairly limited, especially for anyone who has been playing for longer than a month. As far as trying new things goes: there are two events I have not participated in (beyond certain battles required for a relic weapon, and forget doing that stuff if progress isn't saved; that's not fun, that's masochism), and I have no interest in one, and I expect I will do the other before the servers close down. As far as exploring goes: the world is getting a re-design for a reason. Aside from the fact that each region is relatively small, they're also extremely repetitive in a visual scale. You've seen one part of the Black Shroud and you've seen it all with very few exceptions. There's nothing left for a majority of players to explore.
3. Screwing around for the hell of it may be fun for all of a week, but that quickly amounts to, "I'm going to go run into this area with level 90+ enemies and see how long I can survive." I don't know what other kind of "screwing around" exists. Really, screwing around for the hell of it seems to amount to, "I'm going to dick around in game and not care how many times I die, because none of the consequences matter." I don't see that as sustaining entertainment for any real amount of time.

The biggest reason that all of this is irrelevant is because there's another thing that, at a point, everyone will be doing with their time. Another environment where these three points are not as boring or crazy. That's called open beta. That's where exploring new places and trying new things will be exciting because it will actually be new. And screwing around and trying crazy things will be the whole point as you try to figure out the new game mechanics.

And guess what? None of that data will be saved either. But at least it's not in the old build of a game with enough problems that they had to remake it from the ground up. I can appreciate that if you've only been playing for a short time and haven't experienced much of version 1.x yet, but I've been playing for a few months now, and I already feel like I've done just about everything the game has to offer right now. There are people who have been playing longer, of course (like BoB and smitten), and I don't understand how they'd feel particularly different.