After playing countless MMO's, the ones that sucks are the ones that neglect to explain how you play the game. Just throwing you in and running off is not really the way to make a game endearing to players.
Played the beta of FF XIV and the UI really did suck. It felt like I had to fight with the UI to get basic things done. Why so many little boxes that I have to click on? Why not streamline everything and get rid of that annoying mouse/menu lag? one of the reason WoW works is because things are always getting streamlined and easy to access. SE are still stuck remaking FFXI because they saw a moderate success with the game from FF fans. They don't need to remake WoW but they could certainly look at some of the basic things it does right.
Crafting was fun but really badly explained. Again, its the game just throwing you in and saying nothing about it. Crafting is supposed to be a fun diversion and a way to help the in-game economy. After failing over and over to make basic objects, its easy for people to just give up.
While the texture/terrain copy & paste is there, I did not notice it too much but the endless trudging around boring terrain really does suck. The main cities are really beautiful but once you step outside, everything does feel a little too confined. Even in the open maps, you're still restricted where you can actually go.
Fans will love it and I am sure SE will fix some of these issues, so the PS3 version might be the one to get but I am not sure they will be fixing some of the major issues any time soon.