It's tiring because no matter what MMO you come up with, it wasn't fully prepared at launch, it wasn't ready. Most likely it would not have had an Auction House, would have had server crashes, would have had lag, would have had balancing issues, etc. etc. etc. From what I've read about each of the "changelogs" I've read over for the first year of launch of various major MMO's, they always start out this way. Does that mean you're paying for Beta? No, it doesn't. Does that mean the game is broken? Well, it's not fixed, so maybe. But is it playable? Absolutely. Does it have enough to keep most people busy? Sure. But people have been complaining left right and center about all sorts of things - even some saying that they shouldn't have to grind in an MMO, which was rather perplexing.

MMO's simply don't go live without a lot of things missing and a lot of things broken. It's standard. If you want to play it at launch, then you can call it paying for beta or whatever, but this is what you get. It's not SE that came up with this strategy and to be honest I'm just glad that they are fixing things over the past week that make things noticeably better. The chat issues (that I had) are all resolved as of two days ago, and a lot of actual genuine "broken game" instances have gone, along with the constant server crashes. This, to me, is progress. I can play the game and enjoy myself.

In a poll I was looking at the other day, 75% of people were enjoying playing the open beta and would buy the game and were excited.

EDIT: And to answer your specific question, my problem is that people are flaming FFXIV everywhere for "allowing" the PC to be a "PS3 Beta" and saying they should have waited for a further six months for release instead, as if SE would endorse six months of open beta as a freebie. The various FFXIV forums are full of a few people going around every thread and slagging FFXIV off, mostly coming from late FFXI with what is essentially a "Why can't they have everything FFXI has right now at launch?" argument and the others coming from WOW slating everything they possibly can.

A large number of people then sit with what are felt to be trolls and the debate never ends. That's what I found tiring.

A beta is a pre-release. To say we are paying for a beta is inaccurate. We are paying for an initially flawed product, but not a beta. Of course, some could say that if you joined FFXI right now, you're paying for a flawed product there, too, because they don't have everything that FFXIV has...