I'll confess that was a little lengthy for me to fully read through at the moment, but seems like a good write up!

I'm loving it - looks like you touch on an important point late on, in that everyone has something genuinely interesting to say in-game. It's unfair for me to comment too much on WoW as I've not played it for years, but when I did, it was quite transparently "I've been given something very generic to say to serve a purpose, and now here's a generic quest to hunt 5 murlocs and bring back my lost trinket", I found this ludicrously boring and just couldn't be bothered, and despite the hunt and fetch quests being similar in XIV the level of immersion is much greater for the more detailed and genuine storytelling and characters outside of the main quest.

I also like that I can do what I want and always be contributing to my character in some way. Whether it's plain grinding, following quests, FATEs, levequests, hunting logs, crafting, working on another class... whatever I feel like doing that day isn't going to feel like a "waste of time that could've been spent doing x", and that's highly valuable. It means I can just have FUN and not worry about it, which is just awesome in an MMORPG.

Agreed on the intro sequence with the friendly old travelling fella. Having already sat through it a couple of times in beta, this is long and gets extremely old - I long for a "skip the intro bit" button.

I wasn't even able to get hold of the game for the first few days, so pretty much missed logingate. Though I could only create a character on a NA server, I think I like that - I'm the type of person who stays up late, and it'd drive me nuts on EU servers everyone going to bed at like 11pm. The longest I've had to queue was about 30 seconds.

The big annoyance at the moment though is spam. You go into Ul'Dah and instantly get flooded with HUGE amounts of gil selling spam (for some reason the gil sellers think it'll really convince people to buy if they repeat their message twice per second). Typing /blist add "Name Of Player" gets very tedious very fast, and desperately needs a "Report and Blacklist Spammer" option on the menu that pops up when clicking on a name.