Yeah I hear ya. After thinking about it for awhile, I think it comes down to what you expect from an MMO and how you see the genre.
I'm from the old Everquest, SWG, FFXI camp and see the genre from that point of view; a real sense of danger and loss if things go wrong, a sense of time passing, communicating all the time with others to overcome something, tactically managed combat and a drawn-out pace to the flow of the game. Something as a gamer you approach with a completely different mindset than a single-player game.
FFXIV doesn't feel like an MMO to me. It's more like a controlled single-player game but with multi-player, instanced dungeons and an ever present chat-box. It's a fun little roller-coaster when you first get going, but just like SWTOR, WoW and LOTR, it comes and gets old within a couple of weeks.
Yeah, I think due to having played MMOs for the better part of 10+ years I've come to expect something on a larger scale (or at least more of a sense of being in an online ever-persistent world), or at least something that may not start off as anything particularly great but develops into a better game over time.
Whether it's because more and more MMO developers are trying to cater to the Casual/Facebook crowd more these days I don't know, but as you say there just isn't that same sense of danger or urgency. Sure I don't have as much time to play games as I used to, but I still miss that feeling of community and having to group together to tackle quests or other content. That was one of the things that drew me into MMOs, as well as the planning and control needed to successfully complete a raid or dungeon, as opposed to say a Single Player RPG where everything is intended to be solod and you can just faceroll your way through everything (I know there is strategy involved in some Single Player RPGs but it's just not at the same level of coordination).
So far it's not feeling like much of an MMO to me either - for me it's largely because the world feels so "disconnected" in that it's split up into zones, and I'm just not getting that same sense of scale or that I'm really in an online world. It could just be the early zones that feel like that though, so I'll reserve judgement for later content. As it stands I'm expecting this game to be another "roller-coaster", but I hope I get proven wrong
I don't know Nimdok, once a game feels boring same ole same ole, it's very hard to stick with it, and to be honest nor would I want to, that's beingmy/our problem of late finding a game that we can play for a few years, getting to a point where I don't believe that will happen again, even GW2 which was not that bad died very fast.
I still believe these games are struggling or dying is due to them not being social, think the game I'm holding out some hope for is WS.
Time will tell.
Cheers for adding us to the guild list, we will be on Moogle server.
That's the same problem I've had with most MMOs - it starts to feel stale, or I lose that enthusiasm I first had for it. I do find it very hard to go back to a game once I've lost that "spark", and I do try to revisit ones I got bored with in the past to see if I can make it further but it rarely lasts for longer than a week before I give up. I really enjoyed Guild Wars 2 and thought it would finally be a current gen MMO I could play for years on end, but once I hit 80 I just became incredibly bored with the game, and all my IRL friends quit once reaching the same point so I struggled to find reasons to stay.
As someone mentioned previously in one of these discussions (I think it was Xinn), the inclusion of LFG tools seems to be one of the main killers of that feeling of community and social interaction with other players. Nowadays it just comes down to "Oh I need to do X dungeon, instead of finding other players and manually grouping up to tackle content, I'll just put myself in the queue and be done with it and the dungeon in a few minutes". While in a sense the tools can be a godsend when I'm pressed for time and can't find any other players, I really do miss finding groups of people I can get along with and have a laugh with, do a dungeon and then carry on doing stuff together afterwards like more dungeons or just generally levelling together. It may seem like a little thing but it really does just add a whole other layer of immersion and feeling of being in an online game.
No problem
will update it with the server details too.
come release I'll add everyone's in-game names and the servers they're on in the 2nd post (should make it easier for people to see who's where and where most of the forumites are gathering). 
don't think they've even officially announced the dates of the final phase yet, so I'd hazard a guess that your key/access applies to the one starting tomorrow.