For the people that are used to current MMOs it still will look broken.
But I think they tried to give a multiplayer game a single player feel to it when it comes to questing.
The Director resigned because it was a "political move" from Square-enix, someone had to be blamed, thing is, with so many running projects that S-E has constantly their teams on FFXIV simply didn't receive the complete script to follow the story through the game, now that the majority of the game engine is complete it will take a longer while to fix it with story to follow with.
Personally I think that game shouldn't have left the beta stage yet, but you do get the feeling of being literally dropped in the middle of nowhere with only basic supplies and go figure.
First thing I do in games is checking all the menu's and buttons to see what the hell the game has, it's a habit of mine.
Everything else is secondary.
Journal is easy to navigate but you need to scroll through more stuff like map and everything else, so as far as Single player game would go, this would be a fairly successful game in it's early beta stages or even alpha, but there really is no justification to charge money at this point yet. Hence I dropped the game.
Like you said, the game had potential, but the most major problem was that Square-enix made a fuss about creating a whole new world for a single title, when they knew very well that everyone loves Ivalice.
S-E does things in their own weird way, I'm sure they have a plan for it, but it's more like a baby playing toys, building something with blocks to see what happens. They pretty much fail in the past few years quite a lot.
