a lot of people pay for 2 mmos. it's really not that expensive. whether they play them is another issue, but they're not well correlated. SE being greedy whores is nothing new. They never said anything about keeping fees to keep servers up - it was just a matter of maintaining status quo. Nothing needed to be changed.
I've been subbed to XI for a good 12 years and XIV for at least 3, but there have been points in between where i don't play for months on end, or when I didn't touch XIV because it was going to shut down anyway. Whether there was content wouldn't have made a difference because I didn't play it anyway. All I wanted was to keep my account active so I could pop in anytime if I wanted to.
If I wasn't happy, I could just unsub. SE doesn't owe me any obligation to retain my patronage. Besides, with XI, they've set their sights on a bigger market already.
you're not making a very good point. the current version of ffxi is already nothing like the ffxi you remember. No individual content takes more than an hour to clear. Most fall within the timespan of 20-30min. FFXI has evolved and will continue to evolve when it hits mobile. You sound like you refuse to admit it.
And it's not like they're forcing you to play it.