to OP: keep "dumping" money into ff14, primarily because many of the changes that have already been made to 14 are to make it more ffxi-like.
ff14 is going to be an interesting situation, 99.999% of games are almost completely designed before any player(read: purchaser) actually gets his/her hands on it and the first year of ff14's existence is a case study in the problems that method can produce. overly egotistical directors/producers decided they knew what the consumers wanted, and they were proven to be VERY wrong.
the special circumstance is the massive financial and philosophical loyalty the SquareEnix company has towards their product. They will not allow it to fail. they'll be forced to accept less than a world smashing success yes, but failure is not an option. the active-redesign policy they've basically built from whole cloth means FF14 is a game that is going to be designed from the ground up with an entire community involved. not 12 guys in an office, but the hundreds/thousands of people who will actually play.
everyone who's actually played within the last 3 months or so all say the differences between the current game and launch are night and day, and they're not done with improvements, improvements that are largely community driven.
FF14 will never be a wow-/tor-killer like many have hoped, but success on the level of XI is not at all outside the realm of possibility. Those responsible for the failures have been removed, and the current devs entered with a humility that SE has been lacking for nearly 10 years. In the long run this will produce a better product, one worthy of being a numbered Final Fantasy.